There haven’t been many times since 2007 that I’ve shared WorkPro’s journey - the challenges of start-up and the special milestones that continue to inspire us to never stop innovating for our customers and candidates. 

If you’re a business owner, someone who works in HR or Recruitment, or if you’ve been leading the way in evolving HR tech in the SAAS space, you’ll appreciate the extraordinary effort it takes to ‘keep building the plane as we are flying it’. There have been very few times that I’ve stopped to contemplate exactly how special the WorkPro solution is for our users. 

Telling the story now and reflecting on our path is perfect timing though as we launch our new brand to the market with renewed energy, motivation, and commitment. 

When WorkPro was launched in 2007, our main advocacy was establishing consistency in workplace safety learning for the recruitment sector – this was a time when industry standards were not yet determined and business owners and hiring professionals had limited access to expert advice and measures to ensure that their candidates were equipped with safety information prior to and during their work as an on-hired worker. We felt compelled to do something, deliver it efficiently and make it accessible to any individual. 

It was a bold move. We wanted to conquer an entire sector, engage a community where there was little appetite for work safety risk and pioneer a concept where a candidate had a portable online profile that they could share with another subscribing company to reduce repetition and genuinely establish consistency in learning. As we started to gather momentum and gain pilot feedback, what became obvious was the significant pain points relating to other areas of work-readiness – background screening that was manual and took forever to finalise, the need to physically collect employment licences and tickets, and monitor them for currency on an excel spreadsheet, manual reference checking and playing phone tag and interrupting people’s day, taking a copy of passport as proof of work rights. 

Our body of work suddenly expanded, and we were away. We could address workplace safety, but we could also create a single solution that systematically enabled recruitment teams to curate an appropriate screening and onboarding program for every candidate, every time, and always keep them compliant. This led us to our constant: 

Empower businesses to have a job-ready workforce, always. 

It took us close to 10 years to build an efficient, secure, flexible, and automated HR tech with a dashboard that delivers this end-to-end approach. Here’s our learning along the way and I hope this will help you in making decisions for your own organisation:

Smart Simplicity

This is our evaluation criteria for everything we do, and it is a challenge to make the complex simple. From integrating local and global background and probity checks, to automating reference checks with in-built fraud detection. Keeping a learning management system and module library up to date against legislation or providing learning where there has been an increase in work-related injury. Constantly updating and mapping employment related licences & tickets so our customers can seamlessly collect, validate and rely on us to automatically monitor currency. 

The security of our data is of course paramount to all users and turbo-charging our integration strategy to keep up with the demand for hiring efficiency remains one of our priorities today. 

We always go back to the basic questions of: Can it be better? Can it be simpler? 

Actively Anticipate 

The tech and HR industry is ever evolving. We recognise the laws of accelerating returns, so when we build solutions, we understand that they might not be perfectly future-proof, but the solutions are future-flexible. Our active anticipation does not only apply to tech, but our ear is always open to anticipate legislative change and hiring challenges that will impact our customers and building or improving a function that continues to drive efficiency. 

Deliver Always 

It’s a tall order but everyone in our team needs to stand behind this. Don’t get me wrong, we are not being perfectionists, but we are after the constant pursuit of excellence in all we do. The context is simple – turn up for our customers, for our sector and for our team always. That’s why when there’s a legislation change that affects employment, we are the first to create eBooks and eLearning modules. When there are delays in background checks that are out of our control, we inform everyone who’s affected and work towards a solution. When there are new trends and industry news, we talk about how this is going to affect HR and recruitment operations for everyone. It is hard to do this all the time, but it is our team’s commitment. 

It's been 16 years since we started and it is fair to say that we have grown with the HR and Tech industry. We’re all in this together as we continue to make these industries better for all of us. 

This all goes back to empowering businesses to thrive using WorkPro. We believe that a job-ready workforce makes everything better not only for the business but the job-seeker. 

Tania Evans - WorkPro CEO & Founder