We won at Xerocon!
We're honoured to be recognised by Finance Software and Accounting Giant Xero at the Xero Awards 2018. Weploy co-founder Tony and the Weploy Growth team headed over to Brisbane where Xerocon 2018 was held to celebrate, and accept the award.
What does this award mean for us?
The win is hugely significant: both for Weploy as a company of course, but also because it shows a shift of thought in a typically (historically) traditional industry. The recruitment industry was designed for an era before our current digital capabilities and has been functioning inefficiently with too many variables for too long. When you consider also, that by 2020, the number of on-demand, freelance or contractors will more than double to over 7.6 million people, it is becoming harder and more complex to access talent, with all sorts of hidden costs and unfair margins. To have a (giant) like Xero recognise that the way people are working is changing and embrace a novel tech solution to a traditional problem is really exciting. We are building a marketplace that will shake up the industry - allowing businesses direct access to skills-matched talent pools, cutting out the middle person.
Our vision is to change the way we look at employment by creating the world’s best community of on-demand staff. By creating a simple online platform that connects companies directly to pre-screened Weployees, we're able to cut out the middle person and provide the fastest and easiest way to solve immediate staffing issues.
“It feels great to win the Emerging App Partner Award! It’s an absolute honour to be recognised by an Industry thought leader like Xero, and we’re proud to be a part of the Xero ecosystem.
Since we're trying to shift the way people think about hiring staff, there's a lot of re-education that goes on with our App. People are so used to the traditional way of hiring involving endless agency phone calls, hours of screening and interviews, the backlog that payroll creates... Often it isn't until you show them just how easy it is to use our platform and have a job posted and filled before their eyes that they have a lightbulb moment. Seeing how simple it is combined with the quality of the candidates coming through let's them think of new ways they can use on-demand staff to drive productivity in their business.
Also, it is a common misconception that because our Weployees are managed through a platform, the quality is not as high as traditional agencies which is actually quite the opposite. By utilising technology, we're able to put our Weployees through a 6 stage screening process, instead of the single round agencies do, to find high quality people, consistently.
What challenges is Xero facing in talent acquisition?
The Team Xero value proposition to the candidate market is a strong one: we believe that you can come and do the best work of your life at Xero. And you can do so at a business that:
- Is one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the world
- Is purpose-driven and committed to having an impact on the lives of our customers
- Has a set of meaningful values that underpin everything we do
- Is always looking to the future, questioning how we can continue to innovate to best serve our customers and stay ahead of the curve.
One of the hurdles we face, which is actually more of an opportunity, is making sure we are truly capitalising on the above messaging and amplifying it to our target candidate markets.
Whilst we have a strong value proposition – very helpful for any inhouse talent team – we also have our challenges too, primarily around scale. In a relatively short period of time, we’ve evolved from a beautiful accounting software start-up to a global small business platform. In the process, we’ve acquired a rapidly expanding customer base and built a geographically dispersed workforce of 2,500 employees. There will always be competing interests in a hyper-growth environment, so one of the main challenges for our our Talent Experience team relates to prioritisation of our hiring. Have we nailed that yet? No, but it’s something we’re continuing to work on in conjunction with Xero’s leaders.
How does tech support the recruitment process for you at Xero?
We use a range of tools and technologies to aid our recruitment process here at Xero (there are some variances by region). As we continue to evolve our TX function, we’ll keep reviewing both existing and new tech to best support our efforts across employer branding and attraction, assessment, background checking, on-boarding and talent pooling. We also consider how tech can help us work best with candidates, hiring managers and each other.
While tech is the ultimate enabler, we believe it will always remain human interactions that drive the best outcomes.
What are you doing to promote diversity within what is stereotypically a male dominated industry?
From a gender diversity perspective, we work with some amazing partners like Work 180, Code Like a Girl, Tech Girls Movement, Girl Geek Dinners and Ladies that UX to showcase working life at Xero and highlight the opportunities for women in technology. In addition to our internal programs (part-time developer programs, career change programs etc.), these partnerships have achieved some fantastic results for our workforce composition and the communities that we support.
We also recognise that gender is only one element of diversity. Indeed, our hiring practices, ways of working, internal education and workshops and external partnership development need to reflect the diversity of our 1.8 million subscribers. We will continue to value and embrace diverse experience, skills and perspectives so that we can work better together and continue to innovate for our customers, partners, and the communities we interact with every day.
How does Xero's Talent team work with hiring managers when hiring?
We view hiring as a partnership between hiring managers and the TX team. In our opinion, the key to a good hiring outcome is complete clarity on the position, the candidate requirements and the hiring process itself. We also encourage hiring managers to constantly be out there meeting good candidates in-market and thinking about succession planning for their teams (whether they’re hiring for a vacancy or not).
What aspects of working at Xero do you highlight to a candidate during the recruitment process?
We make a conscious effort to lay all of our cards on the table. Nobody likes finding skeletons in the closet when joining a new business, so we go out of our way to be really transparent about both the benefits and the challenges of working at Xero. Naturally, some of the challenges don’t align well with everyone: Working at Xero is fast paced, constantly changing and requires working with ambiguity, and we call that out throughout the recruitment process. But for those who are up for the challenge and bring a growth mindset and bias for results, the opportunities are second to none when it comes to working with amazing people, evolving team Xero capabilities, and solving problems that have a positive impact on the lives of our customers across the globe.
The pandemic brought with it huge changes for businesses small and large, and with a small, tight-knit team, Weploy and its’ internal employees felt these changes all the more significantly.
Customer Contact departments today are undergoing an immense shift in their customer operations. For years, contact centres have worked in silo from the wider business operations, focused solely on responding to customer enquiries as quickly and efficiently as possible. But today we’re seeing contact centres evolve and work smarter with a range of departments to become an ultimate new-gen CX Hub.
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