New age HRMS platform for enterprises

The founders of Darwinbox, Jayant Paleti, Rohit Chennamaneni, and Chaitanya Peddi during their consulting careers at McKinsey and Ernst & Young realised that organisations struggled to furnish or analyse Human Capital information during critical events like takeovers and talent decisions like succession. In a particular instance, Paleti observed that in a large-scale merger the stakeholders were not aware of key figures like the attrition rate. “We realised that the main reason causing these issues is that typically an organisation has over three HR systems which make it extremely hard to integrate and draw out the needed data at a given time. And in cases otherwise, they still function on an outdated HRMS,” he says, adding that Darwinbox was built on the idea of making HR a strategic aspect of every organisation rather than just a functional fulfillment. Darwinbox helps HR personnel leverage technology to worry less about the mundane, daily tasks and contribute on a major scale to the more strategic, organisational goals.

Darwinbox currently has more than 300,000 employees using the platform from 100+ marquee clients like Paytm, Delhivery, Spencer’s, Ekart, Nivea, Swiggy, GVK Bio, IMI Mobile, etc. The customers range from new-age internet and technology sector to pharma, retail, and manufacturing.

The company is backed by investments from the likes of Mohandas Pai, Sateesh Andra (ex DFJ head) and Silicon Valley based investor Lightspeed Ventures. “We have also been able to double our revenues from the previous year. We are India’s fastest growing HRMS solution and have been recognised as one of the most preferred HCM solutions for enterprises (according to Gartner),” mentions Paleti.

End-to-end HR solution
The SaaS model of Darwinbox allows companies to use the platform on a subscription basis, informs Paleti. The cloud-based HRMS platform automates HR processes across the entire employee lifecycle, including recruitment, onboarding, core HR, employee engagement, time and attendance, payroll, performance management, expense management, and people analytics. “Known for its flexibility, ease of use and new-age features, the platform can handle the size and diverse processes of large enterprises. Not only that, the product is mobile friendly and enabled with an AI-powered voice-bot “Darwin” which reduces the time taken to finish a task by the employee and also elevates his entire user experience,” mentions Paleti, reminding that one of the key challenges for an HR department is handling multiple systems for each individual HR function like attendance, recruitment, performance management and payroll lacking integration. It is a problem for the HR personnel to maintain data on multiple systems and employees struggle with multiple logins with disconnected interfaces. Paleti explains that Darwinbox offers an end-to-end HR solution which caters to the entire employee lifecycle with a single login.

Darwinbox has an easy to use interface which ensures higher adoption with minimal learning time. It is also built with a high degree of configurability to suit every organisation’s structure, roles, and changing policies. “Loaded with new-age features that can transform the talent function of an organisation, Darwinbox’s performance management is one of the most comprehensive with features like Goal Cascading, Continuous Feedback, Multi-stakeholder Feedback, Performance Journals etc. At the same time, the platform brings about innovative features in other aspects of lifecycle like Geo-tagged attendance, OTP based login for the mobile app, OCR recognition for expense claims,” he informs.

Multiple benefits
The platform has many benefits for both HR department staff and the employees. By reducing the learning curve, Darwinbox allows HR users to quickly integrate the software into their tasks and workflows for a rich user experience. “By putting all HR features and tools into a single platform, Darwinbox empowers employees to do all their HR tasks and processes without having to rely on multiple softwares and applications to address individual aspects of HR,” remarks Paleti, adding that flexibility is one of Darwinbox’s greatest strengths, thanks to its highly modular design that allows the software to easily adapt to the changing needs of its clients and incorporate the same into their existing systems and workflows. It automates essential HR processes that usually demand significant time in processing activities such as hiring, candidate sourcing, scheduling, tax declarations, expense claims, reimbursements, and more. This apart, Darwinbox comes equipped with vital data analytics features as well as reporting and insight framework. “These features enable companies to go deep into their HR data and assesses their employees’ performance and other HR aspects, helping them in making an effective decision,” points out Paleti.

At Darwinbox, there are two focus areas for innovation – product innovation and technology innovation. “We generate an enormous amount of data across the employee lifecycle, converting the data into real-time insights for organisations is a real challenge. We are currently working on – adding a behavioral dimension of an employee through psychometric analysis, engagement surveys; and external market dimension for relevant data points such as skill demand, compensation parity, etc,” says Paleti, adding that analysing this data will give interesting insights such as the prediction of attrition, organisation culture and different sub-cultures within, job-person fitment, employee manager fitment, etc. This will help organisations to proactively address concerned areas and make the most effective decisions for policy changes.

The company has ambitious plans for the future. As far as new technology is concerned, Paleti and his team are currently converting the product into the microservices architecture which has been achieved by only a rare percentage of SaaS products of their size. “This will enable us to scale to any level as well as build a very nimble UI layer. We will eventually become a platform where external applications can smoothly sit on our service layer and utilize components of the system such as workflows, role-based access control, etc,” he says. Reminding that infrastructure is very critical in managing this transition, he shares, “Our infrastructure is deployed as code and any change is audited with a version control system. Darwinbox application is completely containerised and managed on a custom build Kubernetes deployed in AWS. We have close to 180 + services running in the cluster and everything is load balanced and orchestrated with playbooks and scripts on top of Kubernetes.” With this advanced infrastructure, a typical release cycle would follow continuous integration/testing followed by continuous delivery/deployment and then with continuous operations, vulnerability assessment and penetration testing are also scheduled as part of our deployment process.

Darwinbox has started expansion in the South-East Asia market and are looking at a 10X increase in revenue in the next two years.