Hexagon Care Services chooses Ciphr for its first HR and recruitment system

Growing residential childcare provider turns to Ciphr to streamline its HR and hiring processes, and enable strategic HR

Hexagon Care Services Ltd – a provider of residential childcare with more than 50 homes and schools across the UK – has chosen Ciphr to deliver and implement its first HR and recruitment system.

“The biggest issue we face is the fact that we don’t have an HR system and that all our processes are manual and involve spreadsheets, which places a significant administrative burden on the team,” says head of HR Emma Wilcock, who joined the company in January 2018.

Another problem for Wilcock and her HR team is a lack of data and management reporting information. “Currently, we have no way of tracking or reporting on any of our KPIs, or any other data,” she says. “For example, I know we are recruiting at high volumes, but I don’t have the data at my fingertips to be able to say how many new starters we hire a month – I’d have to drill down into various spreadsheets to find that information. It also means we struggle to identify if there is an issue with absence, for example, in a particular location – which means it’s hard to proactively tackle problems if they occur.”

The company’s recent growth meant it was the right time to find and implement specialist HR software, says Wilcock. “We have more than 500 employees now, and because we’re expanding and opening new homes and schools, the level of recruitment we’re doing has grown significantly. Having this system in place will enable us to recruit more effectively and efficiently.”

The HR team reviewed two other systems alongside Ciphr, “but when we saw Ciphr, we just knew it was the right system for us,” says Wilcock. “It’s a comprehensive system that delivers everything we need in one place, right from the recruitment and onboarding through to offboarding. But it has lots of other functionality: performance management, training, payroll integration and employee self-service, to name a few. It captures all of our needs in one place.”

Standout features of Ciphr included “the personalised interface, the look and feel of the system, and the ability to automate processes – but the key one that excited us was the onboarding functionality. The fact that we can put policies and documents on there for staff to sign before they start, alongside information about the company, a video from our CEO, and information about their manager and team, is just amazing for us. It will really transform how we welcome people into the company.”

A few months into their implementation journey, Wilcock says Ciphr’s project team have been “supportive and maintained regular communication as we prepare for launch.” With the people management system due to go live by early 2020, and recruitment and payroll functionality to follow in spring 2020, the HR team is “really excited about the difference Ciphr will make: it’ll reduce our administrative workload, freeing up time for us to look at how we deliver HR more strategically across the company.”