Personio: attracting top talent with a first-rate mobility experience

Personio is an all-in-one HR software solution that streamlines HR processes, from core HR management, to talent acquisition tracking, seamless payroll and more, including hundreds of flexible integrations with popular workplace tools. Now with offices in six different countries and a diverse international team, Personio powers over 1 million people worldwide at their workplace.

The need for local expertise and on-the-ground support

Despite the company operating across five countries, Personio’s Global Mobility Team was based in Germany. Reece Procter, Global Mobility Lead at Personio, recounts how this setup presented the team with language-based challenges and difficulties surrounding the intricacies of visa and immigration procedures. This was particularly evident in the Madrid office, which faced recurring issues and low satisfaction scores from relocating talent.

Working with a generalist partner, with no “people on the ground who knew the system back to front” meant Reece's two-person team found themselves internally managing a significant portion of the process - “As much as we tried to interact with the Spanish authorities, it’s difficult when neither of us speaks Spanish or truly understands some of the intricate processes that you need to go through to get settled in a country like Spain”. 
To answer these difficulties and offer expert on-the-ground support to their relocating candidates, Personio partnered with Jobbatical. “We wanted to invest in a partner that had presence in Spain, good feedback, experience with the Spanish visa and immigration process, and people on the ground who could help us and our employees and improve the relocation experience for our candidates”. 

Scaling made easy

Since partnering with Jobbatical, Personio scaled quite significantly as a company and made a big investment in global mobility and relocation cases, not only in Madrid but also in a new office in Barcelona. With huge growth planned, improving the mobility experience for their candidates meant fueling the company’s growth. As Reece puts it “We couldn’t continue to hire the best people into that location if the people who were moving there weren’t having a good experience and wouldn’t share word of mouth”. During this time of growth and increased inflow of people to their Spanish offices, Jobbatical was highly useful by giving the Personio Mobility Team oversight and control of the whole mobility process.

Reece highlights how getting real-time status updates, knowing what point the process is at, and being able to quickly flag any issues "just makes life so much easier." Access to a complete case history and visibility to each step of the process enables different team members to effectively follow up on individual cases and empowers the team to chase employees themselves when information or actions are missing on their side. - “We have all the documentation in one place. It’s a really important system of record for us”.

Not just visa and immigration

"Every case is individual and unique,” Reece says, requiring more than just streamlined visa and immigration processes. While Jobbatical's automation excels in that aspect, it's also an asset when it comes to providing settling-in support. Reece explains “It’s great that people have the paperwork, but there’s a lot going on beyond that. People are moving with families, housing, school care… It’s a massive step for them”.

Being able to track the entire mobility process, end-to-end, in one single platform is a major advantage for Personio when supporting their employees in settling in their new homes. Additionally, Reece highlights the increasing integrations with third-party vendors that further support the relocation outside of just visa and immigration.

Giving candidates “the attention they deserve”

For Personio, time savings were a major benefit of partnering with Jobbatical. From case setup to management, the platform's automation eliminates repetitive tasks like copying and pasting, provides real-time updates, and sends alerts for needed actions. Dedicated Jobbatical agents, meanwhile, offer expert support throughout the process, ensuring smoothness. “We can be largely hands-off because we trust that the case managers are taking care of everything”.

These time savings enabled Reece and his team to “focus on individuals who are moving and give them the care and attention they deserve”. This shift transformed the relocation experience, moving it from less than stellar to a 30% improvement in satisfaction scores almost immediately after partnering with Jobbatical. These high scores remained consistent, with some quarters achieving 100% positive feedback. 

For Reece, a big part of this success is due to Jobbatical’s agents - “On top of the technology offer, which is great, the case managers themselves are brilliant. They truly care about Personio’s employees. They go above and beyond to give them a great experience, help them with any questions they have, and put them at ease about their concerns. When we get written feedback, employees always call agents by name.” 

The results in numbers

Jobbatical proved to be 10 to 15% more cost-effective, resulting in average savings of 300 to 400€ per case. On top of these financial benefits, Personio’s Global Mobility Team has been able to significantly cut down on time spend per case - “We had to put in many hours of manual time trying to work out processes. Being able to trust that those processes are being completed probably saves us between five to ten hours, at least, on each case. We could calculate hundreds of hours of time savings compared to us doing it manually”.

Reece shares how saved time from Jobbatical allowed his team to refocus on internal process improvements and allocate resources for other challenges, such as housing support. Leveraging Jobbatical's platform and partners, Personio now has robust housing support, addressing one of the most challenging areas for relocating employees - “we’ve seen a massive increase in feedback about people’s experience with housing”. 

The Personio-Jobbatical partnership fueled growth not just through cost and time savings, but by unlocking access to top talent. “We’re getting a lot of word-of-mouth referrals to the offices in Spain because people who moved before have had a great experience and that opens up our network to hire better and close offers we perhaps wouldn’t close as quickly before,” Reece explains. “The investment we’ve made has paid off, not just for me, but also for every other area of the business that’s been able to hire based on these referrals”.

An expanding partnership

Based on the success of the relationship to date, Personio is expanding its partnership with Jobbatical to cover relocations to the UK. Reece added 'We are pleased to grow our relationship with Jobbatical in a location that promises to be an area of strong growth for us. We are grateful to know we can trust our partnership with Jobbatical given our success to date, as we continue to hire key talent, and can be confident in the quality of service and support as we attract those to join Personio”.

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