Creating More Time for a Great Vision

A world where everybody has the same opportunities get a college education – that’s the vision pursued by the edtech company Kiron. This online platform which is a registered NGO, has offered free learning opportunities for disadvantaged people including refugees since 2015. However, Kiron needed to enlarge its team first so it would be able to make broad-based education available.

“We hired a lot of new people in late 2016,” says Rohit Kakar, Head of HR. “But our communication with applicants was essentially via email only. There was little transparency and insufficient oversight – neither at our Berlin headquarters nor at our offices in Jordan and Lebanon.” Plus, Rohit is a dedicated numbers man, and he really wanted to be able to analyse key recruiting and employee indicators.

HR software was to both provide a central hub for all HR activities within Kiron and support the evaluation of key HR indicators. However, for Kiron, being a young organisation with flat hierarchies, a complex solution was not an option. The solution had to be intuitive, flexible and quick to deploy. Personio was the tool of their choice.

“We initially assumed that we would need to find separate HR tools for Jordan and Lebanon,” explains Rohit. After all, there are many differences between the headquarters and international offices, such as public holidays, currencies and residual leave regulations. “But it was no problem to implement these adjustments in Personio,” adds the Head of HR.

“Our recruitment has become much more efficient with Personio, and our communications with applicants have particularly improved,” says Rohit. Moreover, the entire team has been saving time: Employees submit their leave requests and report their sick leave comfortably via the app, leaving Kiron more time to look after its about 7,500 students.

And HR needs to deal with fewer administrative tasks. “We now need 25 to 30% less time for administrative jobs,” confirms the Head of HR. As a result, the HR team is able to focus on strategic projects such as staff development and the company’s culture. These are particularly important to Kiron.

And Rohit is finally able to generate precisely the reports and analyses he needs for his work. “In the past, reporting was very time-consuming, but now it’s all done within a few clicks,” he is happy to report. “This saves me between 20 and 30 minutes of time per report.”

Rohit really appreciates that Personio is so intuitive to use: “I’ve been working in HR for ten years and have worked with all of the major tools but none of them has been as user-friendly as Personio.” His favourite aspect of all? The Customer Support Team, noting the pleasant conversations he has had with them.