How Zoho One helped HumanOurce improve their digital efforts to provide enhanced HR solutions

While there are a number of industries in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, HR processes are still not mainstream as they don’t focus on training and employee engagement. This indirectly affects the job market as a majority of good candidates prefer to go to tier-1 and tier-2 cities to look for jobs. “We identified Kanpur as a major whitespace with a huge potential in terms of HR solutions,” says Prabhanshu Tripathi, Founder of HumanOurce. Both Prabhanshu and Co-founder Deepak Tiwari shared the same vision to start a complete HR solutions firm during their college days.

According to them, many corporates operating in Kanpur avoided working with paid consultants as there was a lack of professional credibility. Through HumanOurce, the co-founders aimed at removing this mental block and building credibility. In the last year, they were able to provide recruitment services to several local clients. “We are focusing a lot on developing a credible brand that is not only trusted by clients, but by each and every stakeholder. The vision is to become a trusted HR partner for corporates,” says Prabhanshu.

The company also offers behavioural and management training. “We try to fill in the gap between the training requirement of our clients and available knowledge base in our city. We have been successful in bringing top trainers to engage with clients belonging to different industries,” he says.

Being a small startup, there are a lot of areas to take care of and having the appropriate technology at your disposal is necessary. Since neither of the founders had a technical background, they were in search of a user-friendly complete business solution. It was during this hunt that they came across Zoho’s solution for startups. And it was exactly what they had in mind.

The company’s whole digital interaction and experience is handled in-house using Zoho’s suite of apps, Via the Zoho for Startup programme. The apps from Zoho One include Zoho SalesIQ, Zoho Sites, Zoho PageSense, Zoho Campaigns and Zoho MarketingHub. This helped HumanOurce have better control over their marketing efforts and client interactions.

Although Zoho has helped them in many ways, Prabhanshu says that it has majorly empowered their digital efforts – be it building their website, email campaigns or interacting with visitors through chatbot. The very first problem Zoho helped them solve was building their website. Zoho PageSense also helped the startup get data on website visitors, which they couldn’t do earlier.

“Would you believe it if I told you that I created the HumanOurce website all by myself using Zoho Sites, without any prior technical knowledge? With the data on visitors, we’re able to identify the weaker sections of the website, what causes dropouts and work on improving them,” says Prabhanshu.

He adds, “Earlier, my use of technology was limited. After realising its importance in business, I now put in extra efforts to cope up with technological changes. Technology always excites me as it opens doors to new opportunities.”

Kuppulakshmi Krishnamoorthy, Global Head - Zoho for Startups says, “Prabhanshu is an important member of our growing Zoho for Startups family. Through HumanOurce's growth, we can see how technology can create opportunities and solve important issues in verticals like HR. The highlight here is that the founders aren't from a technology background, and they use our apps brilliantly. Here is a shining example for those who get overwhelmed with using software applications or believe that they have to have a tech background to build or customise something for their businesses. In the coming months, we are surely going to witness how HumanOurce branches out from serving the non-IT services to IT services too. When the intangible/qualitative functions of the business becomes measurable, the most positive side effect is having a lot of time in hand, to focus on growth.”

Going forward, HumanOurce is planning to automate their support processes and integrate technical enhancement with their core processes. The purpose is to make their services more time-efficient. They are also planning to take their employee engagement services pan -India. “As of now, we have worked for non-IT positions only. We have invested a lot of time in understanding IT hiring and we are all set to enter the IT hiring market in India,” says Prabhanshu.