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Apply HN: HR Partner – human resource management for small businesses

6 points by cyberferret ↗ HN
Problem - A lot of smaller companies don't have a dedicated HR manager or team, and don't invest in the time or technology to record important employee information, nor keep track of important recurring events such as performance reviews and employee leave quotas.

Solution - HR Partner has been designed for smaller businesses, to get them on the right track with proper human resource practices. We offer a free tier for very small companies to get started.

We also have an employee portal and leave tracking/application out of the box, and are busy integrating our system with various popular payroll systems.

Differentiators from our competition -

(a) we are region agnostic, and we don't supply pro forma policies and forms that are usually specific to a particular locality. (b) we have designed the system so that external HR consultants can log into multiple companies and help them with their HR workload. This is all part of our philosophy about 'sharing the load' and enabling many people to work on a single company.

Challenges - We basically have a working solution all built and being used by around 120 people (on the free tier) in the 3 months since going live. We are looking for capital and partnerships with experienced marketing professionals who can assist us with obtaining revenue.

Trivia - HR Partner was built by ONE guy and the office cat in a remote city in Australia that is 3000km from the nearest Apple store! This one man team has over 30 years experience as a self employed developer, and is responsible for every single one of the 22132 lines of Ruby code, the back end DevOps, front end interface design, social media marketing, support resolution, blog and documentation creation as well as making the tea.

HR Partner site - http://www.hrpartner.io

6 comments

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danieltillett
Nice to see a fellow Australian bootstrapping. I just thought I should mention that your site is not laying out correctly on my iPad.
cyberferret
Thanks for the feedback - I've still got to spend time working on issues with tablet and smartphone browsers, as well as Edge and a couple of other browsers that have been problematic... but then there is always tea to be made and cats to be fed etc. that keeps distracting me... :)
billhendricksjr
Do you plan to take on a second co-founder soon?
cyberferret
Yes. Ideally I think what I need is a co-founder who specialises in Sales & Marketing so that I can be free to look after the technical side of things, and they can handle the legwork of talking to prospect and recruiting customers.

I don't have anyone in mind, and I am hoping that this process will help with that.

brudgers
How does the platform qualify external HR consultants?

What level of error and omissions insurance is required by the consultants should their advice expose a client company to employment law liability? [even payroll and leave policies are often subject to regulation]

cyberferret
We don't do any qualifying ourselves. We assume that the external consultants are already established, and are just looking for a platform to help their existing clientele. (We actually have a couple of consultants using HR Partner for exactly this purpose now - in fact, a couple of others have asked for a 'white box' edition that they can brand for their clients).

As far as insurance, we assume that their existing practice insurance will cover them (similarly to how an accountants malpractice insurance will cover them if they make a mistake entering data into their client's accounting software).

That's why we don't actually do things like calculate the leave etc., because of the local rules and regulations - we simply cannot take into consideration all the global differences.

Instead we are just a repository or all manually entered data, and we have to assume that the data entered is good and legal. If not, the liability will have to rest with the person entering it.