Boulder Colorado based WorkBright is a digital onboarding platform that lets you remotely onboard your new hires. In this 30 minute episode, CEO David Secunda will walk us through his tips for successful remote onboarding.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 2:
Welcome to RecTech, the podcast where recruiting and technology intersect. Each month, you'll hear from vendors shaping the recruiting world along with recruiters who'll tell you how they use technology to hire talent. Now, here's your host, the mad scientist of online recruiting, Chris Russell.
Chris Russell:
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Chris Russell:
David Secunda is the founder and CEO of WorkBright, an HR tech startup that moves traditional employee onboarding to a 100% percent remote process workers complete before they arrive and he's next on the show. David, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you.
David Secunda:
Thanks, Chris. Great to be here.
Chris Russell:
Give us a quick history of WorkBright. When did you start it and why?
David Secunda:
You bet. Well, I actually want to provide just a little step back on framing. I quickly responded with, "It's great to be here," and I probably should have responded with, "It's kind of bittersweet to be here," because we built a company that was focused on remote onboarding, started about seven years ago because I had another company that was hiring hundreds of employees that was a distributed workforce, it was all over the country, and it was in a regulated industry and it was really difficult and we didn't find any great solutions out there to get these folks ready to work and into training for their first day quickly and easily and so that was the impetus to build this first solution.
David Secunda:
We were really focused on those companies that had a similar workforce that was distributed or remote all of the time and the bittersweet comes in because we're in the middle of the pandemic and really, the focus on remote onboarding all of a sudden has become a health and safety issue far beyond just this technology issue of where are my workers and are they walking into my office. The other company that I referenced has been right in the crosshairs of the pandemic and so again, it's this mixed emotion that there's almost this new focus and popularity of remote onboarding, but it is something that I'm proud of, that we can stand on the shoulders of seven years of work to bring this into this new age of a focus on health and safety around remote onboarding.
David Secunda:
Turning the dials back on timing, again, as I shared, this company was really founded out of the pain points that I was experiencing in the field. These were difficult onboards to get done. We, as I said, worked in a regulated industry, so it was highly consequential. If we didn't get certifications uploaded that were current and checked as well as just all of the standard stuff like the I-9 form and all the various forms that need to be put together to get somebody out there to work.
David Secunda:
When I started talking to my colleagues, I found that I was not alone, that these were really common pain points for folks that were hiring, let's just call them "contingent workers," so those that were part-time, seasonal, temporary, contract workers, most of the HR tech out there was built for a traditional full-time employee and that was just not who we were hiring and we have complexity in our onboarding, we had volume in our onboarding, and so that was really the inspiration and where we moved to in creating the first alpha product.
David Secunda:
We built a product, it was customer-funded. Four of those colleagues in my company chipped in. We built an alpha product. We ran a thousand employees through it. We went through three regulatory audits in 2014 and it really performed incredibly well, and so at that point, I decided to jump over here as CEO and put my full-time focus into growing WorkBright into the company it is today, so it's been a pretty steady growth path for the company going forward from there, but we have continued to just really focus on those employers that have complexity in their onboarding and have volume in their onboarding. Most often, that is those that are hiring these kind of contingent workers out there overall.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. Do you think remote onboarding will become the norm after the pandemic passes?
David Secunda:
I mean, it's a great question that I'm asked more and more right now and as I alluded to in the introduction there, this has become an issue of health and safety as opposed to just one of where my workers are, and so absolutely, my personal belief is as so many things in pandemic have changed, and that change will stick for the long run, like I don't think I'm ever going to get on a plane again for an hour meeting in another place, I think the same is true around remote onboarding, that HR professionals were all thinking about this from the aspect of what do I actually have to do in person and what can I do through technology or through other means, and so looking at it from a health and safety lens, absolutely, I think it's here to stay.
David Secunda:
The other aspects of it that we already know about is that employees prefer 100% remote onboarding solution because typically, they're asking for documents for the I-9 form and certifications and those sorts of things that exist at home and are easily forgotten to physically come into a workplace. It also is a preferred first employee experience that they're not sitting in a fluorescent-lit room going through a stack of paper as their first thing on day one and instead, they can come in.
David Secunda:
I guess the final point of it here when I think about if it's here to stay is all of us as HR professionals, we get out there because we want to work with people, and then we find that more and more, there's this huge amount of administration, 80% of HR professionals time is spent on admin, and so by allowing the offboarding of the admin to technology, it allows those folks in the profession to get back to what they really do well, which is the things that have to happen in-person, the orientation, the training, the cultural onboarding, the connection with people that really doesn't have to happen through filling out your W-4 or your I-9.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. What do you think the average HR person has to know about doing remote onboarding right? Do you have any thoughts on that?
David Secunda:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Speaking from experience, I mean, first of all, this term of "remote onboarding," what does it mean? I mean, that's kind of, I guess, a buyer beware, and we have spent a lot of time recently talking to folks about remote onboarding and it can be everything from I'm emailing my incoming employees some forms, they need to download them, print them, fill them out, scan them, and send them back, to a third-party solution to something else in-between.
David Secunda:
When you ask the question of doing remote onboarding right, the two things to think about is 100% remote, first of all, meaning if you get 95% the way through the process, but then you have to walk in the door to complete some form or do something, it really dismantles the whole emphasis of going 100% remote onboarding, so my first thing is look at it holistically so you can get it all into that digital world, and the other thing, it needs to be 100% usable from a smartphone. There's over 600,000 employees who have onboarded through WorkBright and 70% of them have exclusively through their smartphone. The smartphone is the universal tool of the employee these days, it's not a laptop, a fax machine, a printer, and so you really need to think in those areas.
Chris Russell:
Yeah, a lot of employees don't have a computer maybe or not even a printer, either.
David Secunda:
Exactly, exactly. There are a few other items to consider when doing remote onboarding, and again, I'll put this out there, whether you're choosing a solution like WorkBright, or whether your cobbling something together yourself, the things to think about are the I-9 form, that is one of the more complex pieces. Are you going to use an authorized rep, a representative? Are you going to allow the employee to go to an authorized representative or are you using somebody from your company? Is there some sort of an audit trail of? Everything you're doing everything that is happening right now, there's been a temporarily relaxed set of guidelines that allow employers now to see those work authorization documents digitally for the first time ever, but those are only temporary, so those will come back, so to really think through the I-9 form is one thing if you're looking at remote onboarding.
David Secunda:
The next one is the security of this information. Who else would you give your social security number to, your bank account numbers, all of this personal information when they asked for it? As HR professionals, we're safeguarding this information, and so to really just think about security as a priority in whatever you're using out there, and unfortunately, when I talk to folks, I see about 30% of them when they first go to a remote solution, as I mentioned, they just go to email, emailing documents back and forth. Email is considered not to be a safe medium for emailing of personal information, just because it lives forever in the archives or the folders and email both of the HR professional and the employee quite often, so if their email is violated in the future, a quick search for social security number or direct deposit form can really pull that up, so think about the security of those folks that you're serving.
David Secunda:
The other thing to think about is digital signatures. If you're going to go to a remote onboarding solution, think about best practices for digital signatures, and it's not just typing the name into a line there. The best practice is some sort of a captured wet-style signature, where it's also capturing IP address, date, timestamp, all those sorts of things, because there's a lot of signing that's going to be done there.
David Secunda:
Two other pieces I think about and I mention these off cause people ask me all the time, so these are my top five. You need to create something that's self-guided so that employees can do it without having to pick up the phone to HR with every single form, and so you need to really think through your forms and create smart forms if possible that guide them through.
David Secunda:
Then the final thing is just automation, where for things like reminding employees to get those forms done, if you just email somebody. What's nudging them along to get all of these forms in? It's just something, you have to have that automation of reminders, you have to have some sort of automation around error correction. Those things just get lost when you move to a digital world if you're counting on sticky notes stuck to your computer screen.
Chris Russell:
Great tips, David. Great tips. Let's talk about your tool a bit. Does it integrate with an existing ATS system? Is it a standalone product? Tell me more about how it works?
David Secunda:
Yeah, it's really your choice overall. We built the product to be really, really flexible. We do have an integrated ATS that just kind of takes information from the hiring in the ATS system into the onboarding system, so you can certainly utilize that. We have an open API with an incredibly well-documented and robust set of standards for it, and so many of our customers use our API to integrate to a variety of solutions, but we also make it really easy just to import information in and often just coming from different ATSes. There's not a lot of information you need to bring into onboarding it. It can sometimes just be a name and an email address, so we always encourage employee employers to use right size the effort for what the benefit is going to be, and so that's the variety of options there that they have as far as getting data in there.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. Could you describe the user experience for me from an HR perspective? Let's say I'm making a new hire. Walk me through how your product works in that respect.
David Secunda:
Yeah, so from a user experience perspective, it can be as quick as 30 seconds to enter a new employee, so the minimum amount of information that you would need to enter would be their name and email address, and then a few bits of information about what you're hiring them to do that would merge into the offer letter. Everything is pre-configured in the system so when somebody comes in, we digitize all their forms, but also consult with them to make the best form experience possible for incoming employees, and so there are all of these automations that are driven by what sort of group you place that employee into.
David Secunda:
Often, you'll put in their name, their email address, you'll say that they're hiring for, let's say, a cashier position in Fort Collins, Colorado, and it's a part-time position, and then you choose the groups that might be Colorado employee, part-time employee, and cashier, and those three things would then drive all of the various forms that that employee would receive, so going through a few clicks and then off it goes, and from an administrator perspective, we're built for volumes, so that's really all they have to do. It'll send everything out to the employee and then it'll nudge them through with increasing the level of reminders as they approach specific deadlines and the languaging gets more urgent as they approach those deadlines.
David Secunda:
So, really, then the employee is going about their business in a very clean and simple interface of going through their paperwork and as those forms come back in for the administrator, they can either go into an inbox, which would be a digital format of what you would be used to on your desk where you can review that form and either approve it and it just goes right into their HR file, or you can reject it and write a very specific reason that it was rejected, that'll go back to the employee, give them a deep link right to that form and the issue that was needing attention, and then it will continue to nudge them and follow-up with them until they get that corrected.
David Secunda:
But then we also have the ability to set forms to auto-accept, so if you don't need to see them, if those forms are going to come in, they just need to be filed, then that happens automatically. Like an offer letter, if it's signed, if it meets the criteria, it can just go right into their HR file. Then from an admin perspective, you're watching a temperature gauge format across your workforce and you can very easily see where everyone is in the process and then dig in if there is any friction in it.
Chris Russell:
Gotcha. All right. You want to just break down the pricing briefly if you could for us?
David Secunda:
Yeah, it's priced by the number of employees you hire per year. Let's say you're hiring about a hundred folks, it might be about 180 bucks per month and that's going to pretty much get you everything that you need. It has unlimited admins. We want as many admins in there as you want to get in there. It has unlimited forms. There's certainly add-ons that you can put in, everything from Watsi to background screening to E-Verify to remote I-9 authorized representative enablement, they're add ons that you can do, but the price is pretty simple based on how many folks that you're going to hire each year.
David Secunda:
Really, when people think about our solution, they really look at this thing of why they're looking at us compared to other solutions out there and it does come back to many of the things I've been talking about already that we're focused on this 100% remote onboarding solution. You can do it completely without having to meet with that employee for any aspect, including the I-9 form and authorizing a remote authorized representative to countersign that. That is designated by that employee and so the I-9 form is something that people look at and that is a major reason that they choose us.
David Secunda:
But the other thing is we have amazing customer support. If you look at Capterra, we're consistently rated number one in customer support, and as an HR professional, that's important for somebody to be able to pick up the phone and just feel like they're cared for by a rep that knows them and is assigned directly to them and they can work with at any point in time. Then all of it is just wrapped up. If you look at our solution, it's simple, it's clean, it's elegant, it's not complex. It doesn't need a lot of training for folks to get up to speed on it.
David Secunda:
Again, I think many of these things were built from this perspective that I had. I was a user. I was in my manila folders parsing through pages before a regulatory audit in the past, and so I look at this with that eye and just go, "Man, how do I make this as simple as possible for an administrator so they don't have to have that the administration of learning a complex new tool, but even simpler for the employee?" Out of those 600,000 employees that have gone through, we want to get them through without any friction so that it's dead simple and, and the user interface is incredibly intuitive for them to figure out and it's backwards-compatible on old phones and variety of phones and that sort of thing.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. Has the pandemic cause a spike in your business at this point or is it steady or is it lower?
David Secunda:
Yeah, it's interesting. I was listening to some of your other podcasts and I would say that the effect on us has been similar, which is it's mixed. We have some verticals that were hit really hard. Hospitality was a big vertical for us, the camp industry is another one, and so those industries, as we know, in pandemic right now are down, but that there are many industries that are up. Our number one vertical is healthcare and especially home healthcare. That is growing and robust.
David Secunda:
In general, what we saw from the pandemic was a big spike in downsell and churn in that first month after everything was cratering and then steady sales in those categories that were thriving, lackluster or down sales in those areas that were hurting. For net, that brings us pretty much on plan, maybe a little bit below, but pivoting a little bit as far as trying to be of service to those industries that are growing, but also have the back of those industries that are really hurting.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. Very cool. I went on your career page on workbright.com, was checking out how you guys pitch yourselves to potential candidates that come work there. One thing I wanted to read here and then ask you about was flexibility. It says, "We meet in the office one day a week in Boulder. The rest of the week, you can work from the office, at home, coffee shop, or wherever you are most effective." I love that statement, David. Do you miss the one day in the office at this point?
David Secunda:
Well, it's interesting. We just made the decision about two weeks ago to go 100% remote first and so we've actually given notice that we're giving up our entire office space here and we're also opening our hiring to anyone anywhere as we go forward.
David Secunda:
To your question, do I miss it? I miss it desperately. I got to say, when I see my employees on Zoom, it is uplifting, but we all miss each other. It is a tight-knit group and when I think about the consequences of pandemic, the most significant ones on my team are just the missing of each other and missing that human interaction that we have, so we have certainly doubled down on all of the things that we can do in order to create that connection remotely, everything from we have morning coffees where folks meet with different folks that they haven't met before on the team for just a 15-minute one question in a little Zoom room for coffee in a one-on-one to happy hours to designing a Jeopardy game with backgrounds of information on employees that the whole company plays together, and we've moved all of our strategic reteach to online and all those sorts of things, but I think we all know it's hard to recreate human connection just through an electronic format, and so boy, we do miss seeing each other.
Chris Russell:
Yeah, totally. Well, I certainly appreciate the chat today, David. I enjoyed it and all the best practices for remote onboarding. As we wrap up here, any last words of advice? Maybe give me some good news heading into the fall here.
David Secunda:
Yeah. Well, a couple things I would add just in conclusion on this: The last four people that we hired at WorkBright were all during pandemic, they've been in the last two, three months. These last four people, they were interviewed, hired, onboarded, trained, oriented, and they're working, and I still haven't met, and no one has met any of them in-person, and they are productive, connected, incredible additions to the team, and so it does hearten me that you can pretty easily... I may not say "pretty easily," but with deliberate effort, you can be very effective in moving to 100% remote workforce, not just the onboarding piece, and we're still looking of how to double down on rebuilding that connection between our employees because that's what they're missing the most on an ongoing basis, more than just the orientation period, but it does give me optimism that these folks are onboarded and moving forward.
David Secunda:
For me, it comes to doubling down on taking care of our people. That's what it all comes down to. I think for all of us out there, it's why we got into the world of HR, and this is that time as leaders where we just really need to focus in, even when it seems like the sky is falling in so many places, to listen to employees and how they're doing, to really pay attention to it, to watch out for the mental health issues that percolate up in this sort of an environment and to really move forward. I got to say, as a heartfelt leader, to take care of remote employees, it's effort, but well worth it.
Chris Russell:
Awesome. Well, I certainly appreciate the time, David. David Secunda from WorkBright. Thanks very much for joining me today here on RecTech.
David Secunda:
You bet, Chris. Thanks.
Chris Russell:
That will do it for this episode of RecTech Podcast. Be sure to follow us on the socials: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn via the @rectech media handle. Thanks for listening, and remember, everyone, always be recruiting.
Speaker 2:
Another episode of RecTech is in the books. Follow Chris on Twitter at @chrisrussell or visit rectechmedia.com where you can find the audio and links for this show on our blog. RecTech Media helps keep employers and recruiters up to date through our podcasts, webinars, and articles, so be sure to check out our other sites, Recruiting Headlines and HR Podcasters, to stay on top of recruiting industry trends. Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon on the next episode of RecTech, the recruiting technology podcast.