- The University , Student
- 08/11/2018
Celebrating Euflex grows along with the university
Euflex BV, TU/e’s employment agency, in 2017 recorded its best annual turnover with almost eleven million euros. The growth of the university has also contributed to this success. Today a proud director Leo Robben celebrates the 20th anniversary together with his 22 employees and a large group of regular clients. In the coming years Euflex also wants to play an important role for TU/e in the recruitment of the necessary scientific top talent.
“The biggest benefit of hiring support staff via Euflex is that it allows you to create a ‘flexible layer’ ”, says director Leo Robben. “Euflex releases employers from all the hassle of temporary contracts coming with lots of obligations. That’s what the founders had in mind when Euflex was set up in 1998, when external agencies tried to gain a foothold here”, says Robben, who entered the employ of Euflex three years after its incorporation.
Around that period this type of internal employment agency emerged at all Dutch universities and we were convinced that we could do this job more efficiently than all those external agencies.”
Through the years the service package has expanded steadily. Robben mentions recruitment and selection, mediation between the business community and students who have almost completed their studies via Technificent, organizing assessments, coaching in the career development of employees and setting up the personnel policy for starting enterprises.
Needle
Robben says that the search for suitable candidates cost more and more time for Euflex, which it was commissioned to do for companies – some sixty by now. “We were ever more emphatically trying to find that one unique needle in the haystack, and in these days of economic prosperity such candidates are hardly to be found anymore. Everybody wants the impossible: someone with the right training, with extensive international experience and who also speaks excellent Spanish. We have decided to turn things around and now present our ‘needles’ to the companies. Then it is up to companies themselves to decide whether they mind very much that someone does not have one or two of the desired qualifications yet.”
With its services Euflex aims primarily at companies in and around Eindhoven. Robben: “For us that area is big enough and it gives us enough time to maintain good customer relationships. We focus particularly on small and medium-sized enterprises, for gluttons such as ASML arrange their recruitment themselves, through presentations held here at TU/e for instance. Those lectures attract lots of students. Smaller enterprises often see a rather disappointing turnout at their presentations. We advise them more and more to hire students for sidelines. Then you can decide free of obligation whether such a person is suitable and whether they fit in with your enterprise. If they do, you can subsequently offer them a permanent contract and if you’re lucky they will discuss this among their friends.”
Recruitment of top talent
What will be new for Euflex is to support the university in the search for the scarce scientific top talent. Robben: “That really is a new activity for us and we have recently attracted someone especially for this purpose who is going to set it up in the coming months. Often departments already have long lists of potential candidates for certain positions. We want to get started on such a list in a thorough manner, which implies sound preparation of the interviews and if potential candidates themselves are not interested, you can ask them whether they know anyone from their own circles who might be interested. In addition, we are going to devote our own network to this and if this initiative should catch on, we can appoint consultants per field for an even more targeted approach.”
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