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Optimising HR Processes: How ELMO Software aids Linear Clinical Research in strengthening its ‘Hive’ and centralising their HR processes.

The Challenges

Inconsistent recruitment and onboarding processes compromised the candidate experience

People processes were inefficient

Managing HR compliance was onerous

A lack of centralised employee data made visibility of people-related obligations difficult

“Because HR wasn’t in-house, teams were left to their own devices to perform some of the stock standard HR processes. This meant HR was being done in lots of different ways, and that led to inefficiencies and wasted time.”
Toby Goor
Human Resources Lead at Linear Clinical Research
A historical absence of in-house HR brought about unstructured, inconsistent, and often inefficient HR processes at Linear Clinical Research. Many people operations were managed manually, resulting in high volumes of paperwork.

Recruitment, in particular, was an area lacking a consistent approach. “When it came to our recruitment processes, an individual could apply for two roles at Linear and have two very different experiences,” Toby Goor, Human Resources Lead, says. “This had quite an impact on the candidate experience.”

Meanwhile, onboarding was a heavily paper-based process. “Being in clinical research, it’s very compliance-based and regulated, so we had lots of physical pieces of paper that were having to be sent to candidates, returned, filed, scanned and signed,” Goor explains.

Managing people processes became yet more complex due to a scattered workforce and an increasing shift towards hybrid work, particularly when it came to compliance training – a critical priority in a tightly regulated industry.

“With the advent of COVID-19 and the reality of working across many different sites, we had a hybrid workforce where some people worked from home and some people on-site. We had an employee in China and others in Adelaide. The challenge was how to check that staff were completing the relevant training, without having a physical training file that sits in the cabinet at our Nedlands site [Perth],” Goor explains.

“One of the biggest problems we faced was having so many different systems in different places. We had spreadsheets, documents, one platform for ‘this’ function and another platform for ‘that’. We just didn’t have one single source of truth. There was lots of duplication and reinventing of the wheel,” he adds.

With so many systems in different places, it was clear Linear’s documentation of people operations needed to be streamlined.

The Solution

Linear Clinical Research needed a HR technology solution that would streamline processes, boost the candidate and employee experience, and enhance the visibility of HR operations – all while being compliant with the highest level of security.

Goor suggests that the quality of the user experience was a key consideration when selecting a human resources information system (HRIS): “One thing we were really looking for in our HRIS was a great user experience. We wanted a system that was easy to use, fast and intuitive – while also being customisable.”

ELMO’s strong data security credentials^ were a key drawcard for Linear. “Because of the industry we work in, security is very important. Our quality and data governance people are very rigorous in their approach – so any HRIS had to meet high-quality standards and data governance requirements,” Goor says. “We looked at several HRIS systems based on our needs and in the end, we selected ELMO – it’s the best!”

Linear Clinical Research then went on to implement additional ELMO modules, including HR Core, Recruitment, Onboarding and more.

Goor was impressed by their implementation experience with ELMO. He explains: “My experience from the get-go was that there was an obvious logical, sequential and well-thought-out process for the onboarding. We were drip-fed information rather than being overloaded and it was obvious it had been structured in the best possible way.”

^ ELMO Software is ISO 27001:2013 certified. This certification is an important way to demonstrate our commitment to security at all levels of the business and that security is a core ongoing and evolving aspect of our business operations and services.

The Benefits

Created streamlined and consistent recruitment and onboarding processes

Greatly improved the candidate experience

Created a single source of truth for all people-related data and processes, enabling smarter decision-making

Enhanced visibility of training activity in a compliance-focused environment

Since we’ve implemented ELMO, we’ve been able to have standardised approaches and processes for all of the teams to follow. Processes that were previously taking us significant amounts of time can now be done at the click of a button.
Toby Goor
Human Resources Lead at Linear Clinical Research
Toby Goor BG 2

Implementing ELMO’s technology – in particular the HR Core module – provided Linear’s HR team with a centralised place for all HR processes while enabling greater automation of many time-consuming people processes.

Onboarding, in particular, has benefited significantly from automation: “Now with ELMO, we’ve been able to go digital with onboarding. At the click of a button, a candidate receives all the information they need, and they send it back to us the same way, which has been great for the candidate experience,” Goor says.

Training challenges have been helped by ELMO’s Learning Management module, particularly when it came to managing and tracking the training activity of the geographically dispersed workforce via what Goor describes as a “single source of access”.

Linear has also benefited from many of ELMO’s pre-built customisable courses. “The courses are extremely handy and stop us from having to reinvent the wheel. We just add little bits of pieces of our own to customise them, and they then become ours,” says Goor.

Finally, ELMO has played an important role in enabling the team to make more informed HR decisions and to achieve one of Linear’s strategic priorities: to “strengthen the hive”.

In addition to process-related benefits brought by ELMO, Goor describes ELMO’s role in elevating HR’s stature at Linear Clinical Research: “ELMO makes HR look good. It creates a portal where it’s easy for everyone to see what HR is doing and helps us articulate our people-related successes. We can easily provide facts and figures around how much we’re saving, for example.”

“From a company and a HR perspective, ELMO has been excellent.”

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