What are the challenges Koru Kids was facing and how did CharlieHR help to solve them?

Challenge 1 – Visa sponsorship paperwork

When trying to hire the company’s COO, Koru Kids was faced with the challenge of visa sponsorship – something they couldn’t get wrong, considering the role was so essential to the company’s growth.

As Rachel Carrell, Koru Kids’ CEO and founder, mentioned “sponsoring someone on a Visa is not exactly what you call straightforward”, and on top of having a handbook, it was also about making sure they had the relevant right to work checks and support documents.

Result 1 – COO hired and competitive advantage on the job market sorted

With the help of Charlie, Koru Kids was able to hire their COO and ensure their visa sponsorship was done without any issues. It was a great way for the team to be confident they could do it again in the future!

Charlie helped them:

• Put together a complete employee handbook with CIPD-qualified advisors
• Store all the necessary documents in the software and carry out right-to-work checks

“I don’t know if many people know this, but to do a visa sponsorship, everything needs to be buttoned-down. Without Charlie, it would have taken us 10 times the time and effort to do it, without a guarantee for 100% compliance.”
Rachel Carrell, Founder & CEO @ Koru Kids

Challenge 2 – Finding the right HR documents and putting together processes

Rachel admits it, at the early stages, it wasn’t always easy to take care of HR with no one dedicated to it. There were a lot of spreadsheets and documents spread across different places, and no one really knew where to find them, which made it quite difficult to retrieve the right paperwork at the right time. It was also a potential liability when it came to security.

Just booking someone’s holidays or looking up a piece of information from an old contract could soon become overwhelming.

Result 2 – Everything in one place and seamless HR processes

Nowadays, Rachel and her team run everything through Charlie – whether it’s:

• Onboarding new team members through a seamless workflow – especially if they need visa sponsorship
• Time off management where Slack is embed into Charlie – just one channel to open every morning to see who has taken time off and when
• Absences tracking – easier to report on what type of time off people are taking
• HR document storage – super easy to find information, even when looking at historical data

On top of that, Koru Kids can also confidently handover and offboard people whenever they need it.

“In all honesty, we don’t even have to think about it. It’s doing it’s thing in the background and it’s great.”
Rachel Carrell, Founder & CEO @ Koru Kids

What would you say to small businesses and startups considering CharlieHR?

“To me, Charlie has this ability to be simple, helpful and foundational to HR – it’s also a very joyous software that our team loves to use.”
Rachel Carrell, Founder & CEO @ Koru Kids

It was not only that, but also a way to become super competitive in a market where, at the time, hiring engineers could be really tough.

Rachel was super happy to have made the switch, as it boosted their hiring strategy compared to other startups who never bothered sponsoring visas as it was too complicated.