Electric Ireland Superhomes is a startup based in county Tipperary that provides domestic home retrofits in the energy market, handling everything from design to project completion. It also takes the hassle out of managing the grant funding process for applicants who are upgrading their homes to make them more energy-efficient.
The company is a joint venture between the Tipperary Energy Agency, an independent social enterprise set up in 1998, and Electric Ireland. Founded in 2021, it has grown to over 60 employees – and as it did so, it also outgrew its old way of managing its team.
Inefficiency is the last thing a fast-growing startup needs, and after one year in business, the team began to realise they needed a more efficient way to manage onboarding and offboarding, to make it easy to track applicants for jobs, update the payroll department and IT teams when those new hires joined so they got their equipment quickly, and were set up to get paid.
“We had been using spreadsheets and different email addresses for hiring and so on, but as the headcount grew, we realised that wasn’t sustainable for managing onboarding, tracking annual leave, handling the exit process and also for GDPR concerns. We wanted one depository for all our employee information,” explains Karen Davis, Head of People with Electric Ireland Superhomes.
After she researched the market and spoke to peers in HR, Grouper came highly recommended. Grouper proposed a cloud platform that would provide strong levels of data protection that Electric Ireland Superhomes was looking for, while meeting its people management needs.
Together with a colleague, Karen was involved in the system implementation, moving staff information from the old spreadsheets and documents into the new HR platform. “Grouper were so supportive: anything we needed, they helped us with. They gave us demos for features like managing annual leave quotas, so it was just a matter of clicking a few buttons,” says Karen.
Karen has experience of working with large software vendors and also smaller local software developers, and found many of them to be impersonal or lacking in flexibility. She was immediately struck by the high levels of responsiveness, close support along with personalised account management that Grouper brought to the project.
“It’s the customer service that they’ve excelled in. I was surprised that you could email a specific individual with an issue. The minute we have any query, he’s back the quickest I’ve ever seen. And it’s always solved. There’s none of what you see with many other providers where the provider emails you with a generic response or there’s no flexibility.”
The platform is user friendly with an interface that’s easy to navigate. Karen is also impressed with how Grouper’s pricing structure meets her budget. “We had to be sure of the cost. As a startup, we have to watch every penny,” she adds.
Now, Electric Ireland Superhomes can track applicants’ progress as they move through the recruitment and onboarding stage. The HR platform stores candidates’ CVs and, after interviews, it’s easy for Karen to move that person to the offer stage and send them a paperless contract, all without having to leave the system or open a new application.
“Being a small company, you want everything in one place. There’s definitely efficiency savings and time savings. We no longer have the worry of people not being onboarded unless they’ve signed the contract. You can see the signed contract in the system and you can track that they’ve uploaded proof of identity, and any qualifications if applicable,” Karen says.
This visibility is invaluable during the annual audit for payroll and costs. With all of the relevant information stored in the platform, it’s easy to share pay changes or banking documents with auditors for full transparency – without a heavy admin burden. “That gives us peace of mind,” Karen adds.
“Every company needs a system like this, and this is one of the better systems, in my experience, for a company our size,” Karen says.
