Gaining Strong Data With Personio

Providing people with good hearing right away ​–​ that’s the vision of the audibene team. Thanks to its rapid growth, the company is now globally active and improves the lives of people all over the world, whether in Canada or Malaysia. And its internal processes needed to grow with it to ensure that audibene can continue to grow and scale-up in the long term.

“In the past, we had a patchwork of solutions, Excel spreadsheets and folders for filing documents. And our people team needed to maintain all of this,” says Valentin Neumann, VP of People & Recruitment. “As a result, our database was patchy.”

In addition to this, the American HR software that audibene’s people team had been using was neither user-friendly nor adapted to the company’s internal processes. No wonder that neither the HR team nor employees liked to use the tool. “Our previous software didn’t support our HR work as well as it should have. We wanted to continue to work and grow with seamlessly integrated processes and a sound database.”

Audibene decided to switch providers. Its new tool was to be flexible, easy to use, and above all able to be used internationally. Given that audibene had grown “from a business started in someone’s living room to 1,300 employees,” scalability also played a decisive role: The software was to grow together with the company.

In its quest to find the right solution, the audibene team spoke with almost all of the well-known software providers. During a systematic selection process, the team initially looked at software features live, then evaluated the sustainability of the companies behind the various solutions and finally assessed the price fit and scalability of the different tools. 

“We were looking for a partner with whom we could grow and therefore took a close look at how the companies themselves were positioned,” explains Valentin. The team asked itself questions such as how innovative and sustainable is the company? Does it have a roadmap of useful features? What is the personnel situation within the company?

“We wanted to work with the best player in the market,” says the VP of People & Recruitment. After the final stage of the selection process, which involved reference calls to existing software customers, audibene’s people team decided on Personio. “The decisive factors were the cooperative discussions and the sustainability of the tool, above all,” Valentin continues.

But first of all, the other employees needed to be convinced that Personio was the right choice. After all, the idea was that everybody would be happy to use the company’s HR software. “We explained very clearly what we wanted to improve and what benefits the new solution should provide,” says Valentin.

The next step was to integrate the system into the company’s existing technology landscape. At that point, audibene’s technology teams needed to set aside time, while Valentin and the people team continued to take care of deploying and orchestrating the software. “But implementing the software went really fast overall,” says the VP of People & Recruitment.

Spreadsheets? Redundant folders maintaining employee data? Audibene finally got rid of all that. “These days, Personio is our single source of truth for all HR data,” confirms Valentin. The company’s people team enjoys using the software, and it is happy to manage and customise the system autonomously. Beyond that, other systems audibene uses can extract data automatically from Personio via APIs.

“As a result, we are able to support our growth with only two HR managers for just under 600​ employees in Germany.” Now, each step only needs to be performed once, as the single-touch principle has been implemented throughout, and errors have been reduced by 80% because all data is stored centrally.

Also, all processes are closely integrated within Personio, which does away with a number of manual operations.​ ​Valentin is particularly delighted that audibene now has a uniform database it can work from, as the team has also integrated Personio into the company’s internal data warehouse to get the most out of its analysis.

“Personio continually grows and evolves,” says Valentin. “This allows us to benefit from new features and advantages.” Because the solution is so easy to work with, audibene’s people team is able to manage, set up, and customise essentially everything it needs in its daily work. “Ultimately, we’re able to scale up quite easily, get lots of new colleagues on board, and then support them with sound processes.”