When a small business is scaling, the first crucial step is to assess the stability of its foundations. It’s only with solid HR processes, that your growth will have the essential structure to sustain success in the long run.

That’s something Ellie Mckenzie Burrell, HR Officer at The SEO Works, experienced first-hand.

The SEO Works experienced significant growth, nearly doubling their team size from 48 to 90 people across 5 teams in just a few years. As this expansion unfolded, it became clear to Ellie that their operations had to adapt and evolve too.

Ellie had been using a blend of spreadsheets, physical document storage and a handful of disparate systems to manage employee data and fundamental HR processes. But that needed to change:

So, what did that look like in practice?

A unified solution for all things HR

In Ellie’s words, The SEO Works’ objective was to find a unified platform that could:

• Securely store employee data
  

• Facilitate onboarding
  

• Provide management insights
  

• Handle annual leave and absences
  

• Run and track performance appraisals
  

• … all while giving team members a seamless and cohesive experience
  

And she found that in CharlieHR:

With Charlie, The SEO Works team finally had one place for all their HR processes, significantly improving scalability as the business prepared to grow. Free of all the clutter, Ellie could build solid foundations for continuous expansion.

Five to ten hours saved on HR tasks each week

CharlieHR helped the team at The SEO Works automate repetitive HR tasks such as collecting documents, chasing completion of new starter forms, and tracking personal details updates.

As Ellie explains, it would take an HR Administrator’s full-time attention to manually manage all the admin that Charlie effortlessly automates:

Getting started on Charlie is a matter of minutes, not weeks

Charlie is built so that small businesses can start using it straight away, without needing to go through a lengthy set up process.

Ellie at The SEO Works definitely saw lots of value in that: “Working with the CharlieHR team, we were able to get set up super quickly: we easily imported all our employee data, as well as migrating holiday information from the previous platform.”

From day one of using CharlieHR, the team started using features that were completely new to them, such as absence and annual leave reports:

An HR software your team will love

By signing up for Charlie, Ellie also wanted to improve her team members’ experience when it comes to HR processes. Before, people had to jump across multiple platforms, and a lot of paperwork still happened.

“Today, each team member at The SEO Works benefits from the CharlieHR platform in some way or another,” Ellie explains. “The breakdown CharlieHR offers is great:”

• Each individual uses Charlie to book their holidays and other leave
  

• Line managers use it to monitor their team and carry out performance reviews and probationary periods
  

• Super Admins like Ellie and senior management also use CharlieHR to look at specific data trends
  

CharlieHR not only makes the operational side of HR much more efficient, but contributes to a positive employer branding, increasing team satisfaction and engagement.

Would you recommend Charlie to fellow SME HR professionals?

“CharlieHR is great value for money”, Ellie says. “Along with maintaining all team member information and data, the platform also streamlines complex processes such as onboarding and performance management, making them much more manageable as our team continues to grow.”