Tailored Workforce build their recruitment technology ecosystem

Requiring a significant change in the way employers process payroll, Tailored Workforce took on the recent Single Touch Payroll legislation as an exciting opportunity to re-invigorate the business.

Business Systems and Change Manager for Tailored Workforce, Kris Chand, explained “We’ve stayed much the same for the last 10-15 years in terms of business processes and systems. We were forced, thankfully, to upgrade our systems due to the ATO. We looked at everything that we’d been doing, and said ‘ok, here’s an opportunity for us to actually engineer the way we do business on the back of technology.’

It was David Reid, Director of Tailored Workforce, who decided “FastTrack was the solution for us”.

Kris explained “Access FastTrack was selected because it was the solution that was the most valuable to the business. What I mean by that is that the cost to what the outcome was, was the right solution for the size of our business. That’s really what it came down to.”

Kris joined during the implementation and believed Access FastTrack was the best solution. “David knew he wasn’t going to be delivering it himself, so it was just about value for him. It was the right product for us, because I went back and looked at the other products that we were considering, and thought, although those would not have been the best fit for our business. What we really needed was a very specific area to be dealt with in a very niche way, which those products didn’t offer.”

Change Management

Kris gave an example of one alternative solution they considered and explained that not only was it costly to input, but the user interface was also difficult to utilise in terms of day-to-day use.

“When we’re talking about user experience, I think it’s incredibly important to talk about change management. When we’re going through such fundamental pieces of change, we want to make things easier, not harder.”

Timesheet Interpretation

Previously having interpreted timesheets manually in the past using just pen and paper, customisable automated timesheet interpretation was a critical feature in Tailored Workforce’s search for not just recruitment but also payroll software as “a quarter of our business is payrolling casual workers.”

“Previously, timesheets would be done for a week from Monday to Sunday. Then, we had to employ site supervisors. We actually paid our people to be onsite to get the timesheets, have them validated by a management person, get them signed off, then copy and send them to our office. Then we’d take those timesheets into our payroll office, and go through them and interpret them manually, one by one.”

“The margin for error was so incredibly large. That’s why interpreting timesheets was the single most important process we needed to automate. Due to all the manual timesheet processes, the amount of issues that have been had over the years is incredible. It was such a critical decision.”

It was at this stage that Kris came on board as the Project Manager. He had had no previous engagement with Access FastTrack prior to Tailored Workforce but having come from an IT recruitment background had “a really good understanding of why technology works”.

“I was able to conceptualise what these processes look like, how they’re going to work together and how data moves. That’s why I was chosen for the role.”

As Kris reviewed the program of work and learnt more about FastTrack, he saw further advantages the business could get out of the Access FastTrack end-to-end recruitment platform and its ability to connect with third-party providers.

“I was thinking, well hold on, there are additional pieces of software as a service that we can utilise to streamline every single part of our business”.

“I feel like Access FastTrack forms the foundation of the technology ecosystem. There are little things you can add-on, depending on what your business does, to help your company, depending on how you want to structure it.”

“For us, it was the Onboarded and Ento solution, that was perfect for us. It created our Tailored Workforce ecosystem, with Access FastTrack as the foundation. It’s the source of truth, where if you want to know the truth you go to Access FastTrack, and that’s a central point of truth.”

Less errors, less stress

In their move to Access FastTrack, Kris and his team have seen a significant drop in payroll and billing errors, which in turn has improved their working environment.

“Candidate payroll error rates were up around 5% during our manual period. Our payroll error rates now, are sub 1%, that’s for sure. For a payroll of 800 people, you might have two with Access FastTrack.”

“It’s usually a data entry error – human error. Our adjustment runs used to be quite large, but now, there’s only a couple out of necessity.”

“It’s played such a big part in the culture of the team. Always stressed, always under pressure. Access FastTrack has essentially mitigated that.”

Significant time savings for recruitment

To onboard new candidates, the old process was time consuming, requiring candidates to come in in-person to complete 60 pages with pen and paper by hand.

“They complete the onboarding document by hand, and then someone types that out and manually puts it into the system. You’ve got an hour-and-a-half to two hours with the candidate. Then you have a 30-minute screening, then the interview. Under the assumption all the information is there and correct, you then have another 20 minutes of data entry per candidate, for creating the candidate and client record. When you scale that up to however many we’re doing, whether that be 20 or 50 a week, that’s a significant amount of time. The Onboarded online solution cuts that all down by about 90%.”

By taking full advantage of Access FastTrack’s MarketPlace partner, Onboarded, the team now let tech take care of the admin and spend their valuable time elsewhere.

“It gives our team more time to be working on the business, rather than in the business. That’s a big thing for us. I don’t want to be paying people for menial things that technology can do. We want to utilise them for meaningful work, things that mean something to the business. It doesn’t have to be profitable, it just has to be meaningful.”

Significant time savings for payroll

What used to require manual interpretation of timesheets and data input for payroll is now a simple process of opening jobs, checking they’re entered correctly with the right people in there, times are correct and pushing it through.

“The stuff that would take us three days, with three people, full time, we now get done from 9:00am to 2:00pm on a Monday. It’s done. It’s a huge time-saver.”

Scalability

The shift to Access FastTrack has not only made processes more efficient for Tailored Workforce, but also allowed the business to grow on a large scale.

“We didn’t have the resource to have any free hours to undertake work that would allow progress. And now we do! It’s given us the opportunity to do that, change a few roles around, and there is scope for us to pull back even further, but we don’t want to do that. It’s allowed us to really push on our sales department, because now we have the technical capability to scale, and scale quickly.

Since moving to the cloud, Tailored Workforce have also grown their client base. “Not only that, it’s increased without any increase to our teams. The funny thing is, our teams are under less pressure now, we’ve got more customers, we’re payrolling more people, with the same amount of labour.”

Reporting for clients

The reporting experience has also led to happier clients.

“The ability to report, and how well we can report through Access FastTrack, and how accurate we can be with our data is what is incredibly important for our customers, and that’s where we’ve seen the best improvements for us.”

Here’s an example provided by Kris.

“We’ve got a customer that requires a custom report, a custom set of data requirements. It’s hard to get these reports because by their very nature, they’re custom. But we were lucky when we approached FastTrack and said ‘hey, we’ve got these reports that we need to make’ it was seamless, it was like ‘Cool. Tell us what you want it to look like and we’ll give you a scope of work. If you approve it, we’ll make whatever report you want.’”

“We were really able to capture and find efficiencies, because stuff we have to manually find pieces of information for, now automatically gets populated in a single report where we just have to hit a date range, and off it goes. We’ve saved, just off that one report, for example, 8 hours a week.”

Since going live in November 2017, Access FastTrack has become central to Tailored Workforce’s business operations and connecting with other third-party providers for supporting functionality, where Kris recognises that “in this industry, it’s important to focus on what you’re good at.”

“As we started to discover the FastTrack Marketplace, we came up with a three-piece solution that could do everything we needed for the business. That being Onboarded for our onboarding and compliance, Ento doing our scheduling and roster management, and Access FastTrack doing everything else. For us, we thought that was a great set of products, so that’s why we went down that path.””

“Access FastTrack is the foundation of our technology ecosystem and MarketPlace partners Onboarded and Ento sit on top of that as extensions and provide us niche personalised experiences for our customers.” Working in a compliance-driven environment with warehouse supply chains, transport and logistics, occupational health and safety are paramount for Tailored Workforce. Hence, their need for Onboarded.

“We realised that we needed a custom solution, a niche solution, that was going to be able to allow us to conduct online training, embed videos and stuff like that, do our questionnaires, testing, all online, all before someone’s even walked through our day. Onboarded, tied in with Access FastTrack, allows us to do that seamlessly. We don’t even have to manually create candidate records. It’s literally automatically parsing resume and then inviting them to onboard. As soon as they onboard, a payee record is created, and we’re right to go. Within the next 8-10 weeks, we will have completely removed our paper onboarding process. It’ll all be automated.”

Finally, when asked whether he’d recommend Access FastTrack to others, Kris said “Absolutely. It’s great value.”

“In the grand scheme of things, there’s a lot of add-on products you can utilise through third parties, there are open APIs if you want to develop your own thing to add onto it. I think those are the three things that would make me say I’d recommend Access FastTrack to another agency.”