Horten

The Company

Horten – a full-service law firm
Horten Law Firm was founded in 1953 by Hans R. Horten and has, especially after the turn of the century, grown noticeably into a full-service law office with a strong position in the market for both private and public organizations. Today, Horten employs 200 people, of whom 100 are attorneys and assistant attorneys, and the partnership stables some of Denmark's leading attorneys whose expertise span the entire spectrum of legal specialties.

MindKey knows that its products are best suited to ambitious HR leaders; but saying that the human resources department at Horten is merely “ambitious” would be an egregious understatement. The company is dedicated to providing its clients with the highest quality of legal services, and its aspirations to be the best are not lost on its forward thinking, progressive HR department which is aggressively determined to apply the leading edge of today’s HR tools to position the firm in the top tier of legal services.

The Situation

Significant business growth led to purchase of MindKey™ HCM
The partnership is growing steadily, and the need for an HR system is readily apparent. Before implementing MindKey HCM, Horten didn’t have a system designed to manage information about its organization, its employees, or its recruiting processes, and had no concrete way to measure the performance of any of these.

Charlotte Fricke, an HR Coordinator, explains “Previously, we used Excel spreadsheets to handle a variety of our HR tasks. For example, we maintained a list of employees so that we could produce an accurate headcount. We also used Excel and Word to manage our performance goals, which worked ok but lacked a certain degree of professionalism that a system like MindKey HCM offers. By automating processes like these, we’re reassured that our data is accurate and that follow up activities are consistent.”

The professional HR leadership at Horten was determined to make a change for the better, and entered the market looking for an effective, easy-to-use HR system that it could roll out across its organization.

The solution

Professional solution for a highly professional HR department
Horten has a clear picture of what it wants to achieve through MindKey™ HCM as a system, and the HR process improvements that the system helps the firm to realize. MindKey HCM is the HR solution that the firm uses to manage employee information, its organization structure and job descriptions, full recruitment cycle, and as an employee competency and career development system that is based on and driven by effective, well documented discussions between employees and managers. As the next step Horten will start using the rich performance management functionality to measure, and possibly to reward, its employees.

According to Sten Rode, Head of HR at Horten, they also hope to “improve transparency in business plans, and to highlight business achievement.” The transparency Sten mentions not only benefits employees, in terms of the visibility of strategies and understanding business goals, but Horten’s partners and managers as well. Sten continues,”Clearer insight and a much improved overview of key HR success factors will give our decision makers a much stronger platform to lead from. As a business that relies exclusively on its people, management needs the ability to know exactly where we stand in relation to the human resources we can draw on.”

System processes will engage HR functions, managers, and employees, and MindKey HCM will deliver strong reporting capabilities to analyze data at the company, department, and employee levels.

Another advantage Sten mentions that Horten has gained is in its recruitment processes, “In the past we managed our recruitment processes by email which, as our firm expanded, became a drain on our resources. We used to receive a relatively low volume of applications, so it was realistic to route them to the right people for review using our mail system. Now, however, the number of applications we receive has grown in direct proportion to our reputation and popularity, so we very much needed to automate the evaluation process.”

As an interesting twist, in addition to the HR director and developer roles that typically drive HR product implementations, the innovative thinkers at Horten have also brought their business development chief, Carina Johansen, into the mix which when you think about it makes perfect sense. Horten’s biggest – and many might argue best – marketable assets are the knowledge, experience, and competencies of its attorneys. Therefore, Carina also has a stake in how the company inventories the qualifications of its people, how easily this information is to access, and how professionally it can be presented to potential clients.

Benefits

When Horten was evaluating various systems to achieve this, their key success criteria that MindKey™ HCM should fulfill were the following:

• A coherent appraisal system with focus on performance management and development.
• An HRM system that can evaluate individual employees in a corporate context.
• An integrated HR recruiting system that supports the entire process.
• Give partners fast access to key figures, such as current headcount, budgeting, and forecasting