ABOUT YOU SE & Co. KG
Beyond HR: Success With People Workflow Automation
Industry: E-Commerce
About the company: About You is one of the fastest-growing e-commerce companies in Europe. With an ambitious team, the established fashion, and technology corporation digitalises traditional shopping by creating a personalised shopping experience for mobile and web devices.
Annika in der Beek
Director People & Organisational Development
The Challenge
As one of Europe’s fastest-growing online fashion platforms, About You has built up an impressive track record. Since its founding in 2014, About You has entered 23 markets, 16 of which occurred in the past two years. And with their IPO in June 2021 and admission to the SDAX in September 2021, the company has been celebrating some remarkable achievements.
And growth has hardly slowed down. In the past year and a half, the number of employees has doubled – with almost 850 new hires coming on board. To master this torrid pace, Director People & Organisational Development, Annika in der Beek, had to rethink About You’s HR processes.“ We realised that we had outgrown our existing processes,” Annika explains.
About You’s strategy to master hypergrowth? A central, intuitive HR solution to consolidate fragmented processes across teams and departments. “Our goal was to speed up manual processes through automation and reduce errors – especially when it came to payroll,” Annika recalls. All in all, Personio’s vision of People Workflow Automation matched About You’s vision for streamlined HR perfectly.
More growth and employee onboarding
No uniform database or source of truth
Fragmented, manual processes across departments
1,500
23
80
“The vision is to make Personio the heart of our system landscape.”
Customer Success Management as Key
The focus for About You was on streamlining existing processes and automating manual, time-consuming activities. “That’s why you should start by questioning every process to find out where there’s still potential for automation,” says Annika. To identify potential improvements, About You worked closely with Personio’s Customer Success Management from the very beginning.
During implementation, we worked very closely with Personio’s Customer Success Management. That was important to us because when you implement a new system, the first attempt has to be spot on.
“Our customer success manager is a great sparring partner and a real expert with the system. They know the needs of medium-sized and fast-growing companies. They help us question and optimise existing processes,” explains Annika.
She continues: “It helps to think about where we can still improve internal processes and the new functionalities that will increase the organisation’s efficiency even more. As one of Personio’s larger customers, we also gave a lot of feedback and found it exciting to see the evolution of the product roadmap.”
The Result
People Workflow Automation includes the integration of applications and teams to drive productivity across the entire business. For About You, this resulted in seamless workflows that can already be seen in their onboarding process.“In the past, onboarding came with huge manual effort, a lot of communication back and forth, including teams such as IT.
"With Personio, several processes have now become much more efficient,” reports Annika. The relocation process has also been revised and enables the company to attract international talent even more efficiently. And, with the integration with DATEV, payroll can now be handled internally with ease.
In addition, the Personio Marketplace allows flexibility in connecting even more applications. “We have the possibility to connect specialised tools and create automated workflows from which we benefit across teams.”
This is because the data from connected specialised tools such as Peakon or Leapsome, which we use for performance management and regular pulse checks, is also synchronised with Personio and stored centrally. “Our vision is to make Personio the core of our system landscape and to merge all employee processes in it.”
Single source of truth for HR data
Smooth, scalable HR processes
Ability to seamlessly connect specialised tools
More efficiency through automated, cross-tool workflows
Their Favourite Personio Feature
A strategic partnership has been formed between About You and Personio, based on a shared vision of smooth, automated people processes. “Higher performance, greater automation and improved data quality: these are our goals for the new workflows,” summarises Annika.
With People Workflow Automation, we will have the ability to connect specialised tools and set up automated processes that will benefit us across teams.
Already, their HR team gains more time for strategic HR topics, with a strong focus on an optimal onboarding experience, employee development and the topic of diversity and inclusion explains the HR director.
Customer Success Story: ABOUT YOU & Personio
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