Select HR: "Satisfied all along the line"

Select HR is a rapidly growing global HR company with branches in Belgium and the Netherlands and Dubai. It continues to add and relocate branches every year, so it is crucial that the necessary telecom infrastructure is quickly up and running. That is why Select HR chose Orange. Also watch the video below in which ICT Manager Peter Speeleveld explains how Orange’s services help them.

The challenge

Being on the ball

“Our branches evolve constantly: we open new branches and relocate existing branches regularly,” says Peter Speeleveld, ICT Manager at Select HR. That is why Select HR’s telecom partner has to be on the ball.

The company also needed a partner who could offer stable, high-quality lines. “Everyone at our company works in a Citrix environment. Our computers have no programmes installed on them. Our applications run in a data centre that sends the images to people’s computers. The advantage of this approach is that no programme administration is required for the computers themselves. Furthermore, employees can also work on any device they choose, whether they are in the office, at home or on the move. An unstable network would obviously cause problems, so we must be able to depend on an excellent network connection.”

Select HR’s third key requirement was network Quality of Service (QoS). “The quality of our voice calls can never be compromised by people using a lot of data,” Peter Speeleveld concludes.

The solution

A super-fast fibre optic connection

It has now been 12 years since Select HR and Orange started working together. Right from the start, the partnership included both data and fixed telephony. Later on, Select HR also added mobile telephony. Orange connected the branches with a virtual private network (VPN) based on an MPLS connection. There are two PRAs for fixed telephony in the datacenter. The company’s voice calls use VoIP on the MPLS network and offer guaranteed Quality of Service.

“We started with SDSL lines with a transmission speed of 2 Mbit/s. We recently migrated all our branch lines to VDSL, which gave our branches a bandwidth of 30 Mbit/s. Our branches need this because they invite a lot more candidates to first interviews in webcam sessions,” Peter Speeleveld explains.

Select HR’s head office needed even more bandwidth to make data backups for disaster recovery. “That is why Orange installed a 100 Mbit/s fibre optic connection for us. The migration went very smoothly,” the ICT Manager says. Orange also placed a femtocell at the Turnhout branch. The building is modern and well insulated, so mobile reception was not optimal. The femtocell resolved these problems related to the mobile phone signal. 

The result

Three new branches

“We have been satisfied with our Orange partnership all along the line,” Peter Speeleveld says. “I am the only IT person in the company, so I need to be able to count on our telecom operator’s entire approach. There is nobody else to resolve things when they go wrong. Orange has never let me down. Over the years, I have also built a close relationship of trust with my dedicated contact at Orange.”

“Select HR is opening another three new branches this year,” Peter Speeleveld says. “We are expecting things to go very smoothly. In the past, Orange has sorted out some of our new or relocated branches in just a few weeks. The lines are very stable and the quality of the voice calls is never affected by a lot of data traffic.” In time, Select HR will evaluate the benefits of switching to 4G backup or cloud telephony.

Select HR relies on Orange’s stable connection to set up efficient, flexible webcam job interviews. ICT Manager Peter Speeleveld and recruiter Christine Slootmaekers explain in this video: