How Employment Hero is growing confidently with Pigment for workforce planning

At a glance

• Spreadsheets created a collaboration nightmare, with no single source of truth
• Decentralized headcount approval process with communications made through various channel
• Consolidation process that previously took 40% of one team member’s time is now on the way to being fully automated
• Pigment is now the source of truth for all headcount-related matters across multiple teams and cost centers
• Hiring managers, talent acquisition team and finance team are now able to collaborate on headcount requests and fulfillment in a seamless end-to-end process in Pigment
• Workforce planning and future burn insights are massively improved, allowing for more strategic decision-making
• Hiring managers now own their own cost centers and can make aligned hiring decisions more autonomously

Hamstrung by spreadsheets

Before Pigment, the Employment Hero team was using spreadsheets for all their headcount-related processes and insights. Hiring managers would make requests in a number of different channels, approvals would take a long time to process, and then the approval would be communicated across that same variety of channels, making it nearly impossible for the Talent Acquisition team to feel confident that the roles they were hiring for were accurate. This drastically increased the time-to-hire, as well as creating a huge amount of manual work for the Finance team.

Breaking up with spreadsheets for good 

Because of the existing issues the Employment Hero team was experiencing, they were ready to break up with spreadsheets for good. And where many of the other tools on the market were spreadsheets with flair, Pigment’s innovative structure and approach to collaboration was the clear choice, and they were able to wave goodbye to their spreadsheets for good. Despite it being budgeting season, both teams worked hard to get Pigment live as quickly as possible so they can head into 2023 with a fully functional headcount planning solution.

Tackling the business problem to solve the finance problem

As troublesome as the burden on the Finance team was, they knew that they had to tackle the business problem in order to make a lasting impact. By approaching it from the angle of cross-functional collaboration and finding the common denominator of each team’s struggles – the lack of a single source of truth – they were able to create a solution that has not only solved each team’s existing pain points, but also is far more scalable for the future as the business grows and they add additional use cases into Pigment.

Additionally, the collaborative approach means that they have seen excellent adoption of Pigment with the TA team, as well as the hiring managers. “The TA team love Pigment,” Zhou said, explaining how the single source of truth for requests, approvals and hiring updates has streamlined their workflow and reduced their process pain considerably.

Pigment adapted to their business model, enabling users to visualize all current and historical employee data - from roles, departments, sub-departments, country of residence, to the countries they work for, and more. This empowers them to track P&L cost profiles and leverage Pigment’s dimensional capabilities for advanced reporting, comparing datasets, such as ARR performance by country, analyze operational efficiency, and ultimately, make data-driven decisions to guide business strategy.

A confident single source of truth

Not only are all their headcount-related processes in one place, but because the data is shared across multiple applications in real time, each team knows that the data they’re working with at any given time is accurate and up-to-date, even as the Finance team makes changes to their models and loads new data. As a result, they are able to forecast upcoming costs more accurately and dynamically based on any changes to existing hiring plans.

Zhou also knows that the data will be available at the right level of granularity for the right team, allowing them to slice and dice their data in the way they need to without creating additional burden on the Finance team. They can also self-serve with insights around their time-to-hire, their open headcount, and other key metrics within the workforce process.

An enthusiasm for the future with Pigment

Now that Pigment is live for headcount planning, Zhou is already planning for what comes next. Their bottom-up and top-down planning is next on the list to bring into Pigment, after which they’ll look at Scenario planning, a “must-have” amidst economic uncertainty and an ever-growing (and thus ever-changing) business. They also look forward to bringing cohort analysis, sales capacity planning, and other cross-functional processes into Pigment now that they’ve seen how much it’s transformed their workforce planning use case.