Partner Network: Staffd

About Staffd

Staffd is an applicant management, employee onboarding and e-learning system, based in Australia and New Zealand. Designed by software development company Solvable, Staffd aims to make hiring and people management a breeze for their business clients.

As well as offering a comprehensive platform, Staffd works with a number of partners to provide a fully-fledged solution. One of those partners they’ve integrated with is Employment Hero Payroll – a partnership that ties key employee details with important payroll functions. They’ve been able to offer this integration to their clients since partnering with Employment Hero Payroll in May 2022.

We spoke to Solvable CEO and Staffd Director, Trevor McBay, about Staffd’s experience with Employment Hero Payroll, the integration process, and how he sees the future of integration partnerships.

Challenges…

Unnecessary admin and manual work

Trevor is well aware of the challenges his clients face – whether that’s employee turnover, a tight talent market or a whole lot of admin. With Staffd, he’s worked to make the hiring and learning management side of a business streamlined, with minimal need for data entry. However, there’s more elements of the business that need plenty of the same information, and with that comes more unnecessary admin and manual work.

Payroll was one side of a business that would clearly benefit from gathering key information about employees – information that Staffd could facilitate. That’s where Employment Hero Payroll got involved as the other piece of the payroll puzzle.

Outdated API documentation

Integrations aren’t new to the Staffd team – Trevor can list a number of integration partners that the company has worked with, such as one of our key partners, Traffio. “Traffio is a job management system, so we push employees that have gone through the application and onboarding process directly into their system including all data and skills. We also integrate with Assignar, Xero, MYOB and others.”

“One of the challenges with integrations that we’ve previously built was outdated API documentation. We haven’t had that with Employment Hero Payroll.” 

Another barrier to building past integrations has been the difficulty in testing the connection: “The key thing for us is to have a test environment to play with. There’s definitely been times when we’ve built integrations, and we can’t physically test the other end.”

This led to Staffd’s decision to ultimately partner with Employment Hero Payroll to build an integration: “The availability of a test environment for us to play with has really streamlined the process with Employment Hero Payroll. That helped in understanding the workflows, and then once we started work on the build, they gave us a live environment to test. That definitely sped up the integration process.” 

Solutions…

A trusted solution for clients to integrate with

Always keen to give his clients what they want, they were looking for a trusted solution for their needs. Trevor had heard about Employment Hero Payroll previously from his clients, so reaching out to them seemed like a clear next step. “We’re always on the lookout for new products that are complementary to our product, to integrate with, that add value to our clients – a number of clients were already using Employment Hero Payroll, so we did some investigation around its available APIs and that was the starting point.”

The partnering process was smooth and quick: “We reached out to Employment Hero Payroll and sat for a demonstration to get an understanding of the product, its workflows and some of the features that were within the platform. We then looked through the API documentation and scoped out the work as a team. It just seemed to be the perfect fit.”

Seamless API documentation

As a result of Employment Hero Payroll’s API documentation and support from the team, the team at Staffd were able to complete the build in less than a week. In turn, they could also roll out quick implementations for their clients as well. Much of that was down to what they had at hand, according to Trevor. “That quick build time was really due to the good documentation, which is always key with integrations. Employment Hero Payroll’s documentation was really simple and straightforward.”

The support from Employment Hero Payroll throughout the build process also did not go amiss: “The feedback from the Employment Hero Payroll team directly meant that there were no delays in getting information, which really helped us out.”

Overall, Trevor and his team were impressed with how efficient the process was. “The integration process was very streamlined, and it was pretty quick for us to build and implement with our clients. As I said, it took less than a week for our developers to build the connection pieces to connect to Employment Hero Payroll’s API – so definitely a faster build than some of our other integrations.”

Employee data and payroll information into one

Since the partnership began in May, Trevor says that around 10-15% of his clients are using the Employment Hero Payroll integration with Staffd. “Quite a number are using the integration now, and we’ve had a few clients reach out and get some advice when looking at their next payroll system. Given how effective the Employment Hero Payroll integration is, that’s a key benefit for our clients. Having the ability to push employee information directly from an applicant management system into a payroll system takes away all of the data entry from the whole process.”

The integration with Employment Hero Payroll aligns with the ethos of both companies – as Trevor states: “At Staffd, we’re always trying to provide benefits back to our clients, and asking ourselves: where are the pieces that we can help them meet their goals? They’re investing money in the platforms that they use, and having them streamlined and integrated helps them with their return on investment. So not having to do data entry between systems such as Employment Hero Payroll and Staffd is a value-add.”

The benefits to clients are clear. “There’s a massive benefit in having a web-based onboarding system, where clients can have applicants who fill everything out online in their own time. Having that all integrated with Employment Hero Payroll streamlines the whole process, with zero data entry from start to finish.”

Double the team, double the marketing

The partnership between Employment Hero Payroll and Staffd has been a mutually beneficial one. Employment Hero Payroll has supported Staffd in marketing the products and the integration as well. “We’ve had really positive feedback from clients, and I’ve had a few new clients come to us from that. They’ve seen the information out there so that definitely helps.”

Employment Hero Payroll’s willingness and openness to work with integration partners is unique in today’s competitive market. “I think it’s refreshing to see companies like Employment Hero Payroll that are willing to work with others to help promote their business. It doesn’t happen often enough – there’s not many companies like Employment Hero Payroll that see the benefit of having partners to work with, leveraging the client base and the information that they’ve got. It’s the way of the future. It’s the only way you’re going to succeed moving forward.”

Build powerful integrations with us

We love the opportunity to team up with innovative companies and facilitate streamlined integrations. When it comes to Trevor and his team at Staffd, joining with Employment Hero Payroll has allowed their clients to unite payroll seamlessly with applicant management and onboarding.

When asked about what’s next for Staffd’s integration with Employment Hero Payroll, the opportunities that arise from our API documentation are almost endless. “We’re just about to release our next stage of Staffd in terms of employee self-management for personal details, licences and more. It could be interesting to look at integrating changes to payroll information from Staffd into Employment Hero Payroll.” Watch this space!