The Leading Provider Of School Assessments Transform Their HR Processes
"Having xcd is saving us several hours a week in terms of admin, and that quickly adds up."
About GL Assessment
About GL Assessment
Founded over 40 years’ ago, GL Assessment is a leading provider of educational assessments to schools, working with schools in over 100 countries worldwide. Its mission is to help every child realise their full potential by providing teachers with an accurate measure of their abilities and attainment, and identifying any barriers to learning that may have. It has a diverse workforce, with staff based in the UK, the US, Australia and the UAE.
The Challenge
The Challenge
Many of the current HR team at GL Assessment found that they inherited a system which they did not have control over. Relying on their vendor to process and manage both payroll and HR, there was limited scope for them to manage the systems themselves, and there was a growing frustration with the mistakes and the lack of care provided by the incumbent solution.
For the HR Systems and Development Lead at GL Assessment, this was a problem that needed to be rectified. “We just felt that with the functionality of the HR system, there was no self-service; there just wasn’t anything that a manager could do or see or change. So, we just felt we wanted something more modern. More user-friendly.”
With the previous solution, GL Assessment was also struggling with limited reporting functionality that made it a challenge to gain any valuable data or insight from their HR processes.
Beyond that, there was also a need for support with recruitment.
“We had no system for recruitment,” says a member of the HR team, “We managed everything through forms that had to be emailed around for all the stakeholders to sign.”
The Solution
The Solution
What GL Assessment needed was something that would allow it to bring both HR and Payroll in-house, make it easier for managers and staff to access the information they needed, keep track of absences, and allow for quick and clear reporting on this important data. Also requiring something that could help the team manage recruitment, GL Assessment came to the CIPD Festival of Work hoping to find a solution that could meet their requirements.
“At the Festival of Work, we saw many different stands and many different providers. Many that we looked at could do HR perfectly well, but we weren’t confident that they could also handle payroll as effectively,” admits the HR Systems and Development Lead, “When we found xcd, it looked great, it had the functionality we needed for employees and managers. It ticked all our boxes in terms of HR, payroll, and the support provided”.
Although GL Assessment was not on the Salesforce platform, the fact that the xcd solution was built on the platform gave them a sense of assurance according to one source – “the fact that it was built on Salesforce, an internationally renowned system and platform, just made us feel it was a safer bet”.
“The fact that it was built on Salesforce, an internationally renowned system and platform, just made us feel it was a safer bet”
The Result
With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing a remote implementation, the process was still a successful one, with GL Assessment able to go live with xcd HR in early 2021 and payroll following in the spring of the same year.
Now able to leverage the data and reporting elements of the xcd employee relationship management solution, everything is in one place, significantly reducing the time and administrative overheads of the HR process.
The reporting functionality has transformed the way that the team operates, allowing them to access data quickly and efficiently and ensuring that key stakeholders have all the information they need.
As one member of the team says: “I’ve created so many different reports, all available at the click of a button. It’s really sped up the process because we’re not having to manage multiple spreadsheets or trawl through emails to find what we need”.
With the use of data around recruitment, GL Assessment has been able to change their approach to the hiring process, tracking the cost and time to hire, and the ROI of recruitment for specific roles. Something that had previously been impossible for them to do.
In terms of employee engagement, staff can now access their own records, and now able to see the information that is most relevant to them, they are more engaged, and crucially, require less support from HR to answer questions about basic information.
“It’s just so much more intuitive for both employees and managers, people are able to find the information they need that’s relevant to them, so there’s fewer and fewer queries coming into the HR team”, adds a member of the HR team, “Having xcd is saving us several hours a week in terms of admin, and that quickly adds up.”
“It’s just so much more intuitive for both employees and managers, people are able to find the information they need that’s relevant to them, so there’s fewer and fewer queries coming into the HR team”
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