How This Company Is Helping Businesses Find Zen in Human Resource Paperwork
Human resources, most would say, is a monumental pain in the ass.
The volume of paperwork facing small businesses is staggering: Beyond hiring and firing employees, HR encompasses the benefits that attract and retain staffers, like healthcare packages, investment options, vacation time, transportation subsidies and retirement plans. The field also spans everything from payroll management to regulatory compliance—state and federal tax laws, as well as reforms like the Affordable Care Act, each with its own nuances and complexities.
In the absence of a dedicated HR manager—a luxury many small businesses simply can’t afford—all of this falls squarely on the founder’s desk. The impact is enormous. According to nonprofit entrepreneurial advisory Score, HR responsibilities devour between 25 and 35 percent of the average small-business owner’s time.
Parker Conrad believes this is utter nonsense. The CEO of San Francisco-based software-as-a-service firm Zenefits knows firsthand how time-consuming and energy-draining HR administration can be: At his previous startup, stock research tools provider SigFig, he shouldered much of the burden.
“We never had enough money—or we were always too cheap—to hire any kind of administrative staff, so [my co-founder] and I were always the ones dealing with sending out offer letters, setting people up on payroll or signing them up for health insurance. It was a couple of hours per month that I deeply resented,” Conrad says. “I would stop off at Kinko’s on my way home to fax in their insurance applications, because that was the only way to get things in to the insurance company. I remember every time thinking, ‘This is ridiculous. I can’t believe they don’t have systems for this.’”
They do now. Zenefits, which Conrad and Laks Srini launched in April 2013, aggregates a multitude of HR functions into a single cloud-based dashboard. Employers connect their HR systems to the Zenefits platform—for employee onboarding and offboarding, payroll management, disability/workers’ compensation, time and attendance tracking, whatever—and Zenefits software handles the rest, instantly and automatically completing tasks and processes that
