Xref makes software that simplifies the talent journey and supports organizations to make confident, people-focused decisions. Their products make it quick and easy to collect pre-employment references, employee pulse and engagement surveys, and employee exit surveys—tasks that can take hours of an HR or hiring manager’s time. Xref is headquartered in Sydney and has additional sites in Auckland, London, Toronto, a hybrid office in Austin, and remote teams in Norway and Pakistan. As a publicly-listed company, Xref is required to report to regulators and therefore needs access to accurate and real-time data. They sought an HCM that would meet this need while also being flexible, customizable, and able to run reports. For James Solomons, Xref’s CFO, having a user-friendly platform was a must. He believes that technology should be simple to understand and wouldn’t consider an HRIS that he couldn’t learn how to use within 20 minutes of playing around in the demo environment. His emphasis on usability has paid dividends—many of Xref’s people didn’t like their previous HRIS and therefore didn’t use it. But everyone loves using Bob.
Creating reports that a public company can trust
Xref is a publicly-listed company and needs to submit data on things such as leave balances in their financial reports to the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). In the past, the team used Excel and a different HRIS to gather data, but the systems didn’t speak to one another, and the process was time consuming and at risk of human error. Now, the finance team uses Bob, which is more efficient and ensures accuracy without needing to spend excessive amounts of time checking and double checking the figures. Many public companies in Australia also choose to report environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics, although this is not yet a mandatory requirement. Bob provides Xref with the demographic metrics used for the social and governance aspects of ESG reporting, such as gender and ethnicity statistics. Xref also uses data from these reports to identify trends, which help shape their approach to retention and recruitment.
Generating reports used to take hours with Xref’s previous HRIS, but now, reports on hires, budgets, leave liability, or important demographic information such as gender pay gap or gender and ethnicity representation are easily accessible and generated in moments. This has also empowered line managers to access data without requesting it from the people team. Xref loves this self-service model as their journey from startup to multi-national tech company has required their line managers to take on more aspects of day-to-day management.
Saving hours every month on payroll and leave
Before Bob, it would take Xref’s finance team hours to manually input payroll and leave data from their HRIS into their payroll system. With payroll being run across three regions and new employees being manually entered into multiple platforms by the people and culture team, this was a major pain point.
Bob integrates with Xero AU for running payroll, enabling the finance team to streamline calculating leave for their employees. With 20-30 people taking leave per month, this saves around 2-3 hours on manually entering leave data every month, roughly the equivalent of an entire work week when you add this up over an entire year.
Bob also integrates with other tech tools that Xref’s teams use, such as SmartRecruiters, Deel, and Docusign, which has helped them become much more efficient and streamlined in their daily work. In fact, now Xref will only purchase a new HR tech tool if it integrates with Bob!
Since implementing Bob, the Xref team is confident in their payroll data and able to ensure that CEO Lee-Martin Seymour’s golden rule, that everyone gets paid correctly and on time, is always enforced.
Main takeaways
- Xref saves 2-3 hours each month on payroll by integrating Bob with Xero accounting software.
- Bob’s Analytics provide Xref with data they can trust for reporting as a publicly-traded company.
- Managers can access key metrics on tenure and salaries that help them with strategic decision-making.
- Using Bob, the finance team can simply generate reports on key metrics such as demographics and projected new hires.
