Case Study

Arygest

How Arygest reduced hiring times by 90% and saved hundreds of tons in paper

Challenges

The team took almost two weeks to hire a worker with almost entirely manual processes. With over 150 projects a year, the drain on resources was immense.

Services

A study was developed to identify and workshop all pain points and sources of roadblocks. Customised software was created to address every step of the hiring process that could be subjected to automation.

Outcomes

Significant reductions in materials used, man hours spent and hiring times. The team has been freed to pursue non-repetitive work and be more productive.

Who is Arygest

Arygest is building industrial piping around the clock and around the world.

Arygest works in the industrial piping sector. They routinely manage over 150 workers, and depending on the projects at hand, they hire people continuously. These are highly specialised workers, and the selection process is typically grueling. The construction, putting together and maintenance of industrial piping, following safety guidelines and regulations all over the world, is a highly technical and serious business. The right professionals must be in the right places.

And to ensure that, they needed help.

Challenge

Hiring shouldn’t take three weeks

Arygest’s management team is composed of eight people. A lot of their time was spent on hiring. It was a boring, repetitive and stressful job, but they viewed it as necessary. They barely used software. Just a standard tool to deal with payroll. Anything else meant installing expensive add-ons that most of the time didn’t do much good.

They hired Untile to build something that would free this team to grow.

This whole process was being done mostly manually, with plenty of paper changing hands and hours being wasted. All the back-and-forth meant that it took them between two and three weeks from processing an application to signing a contract.

The job was:

Advertising job openings;
Selecting candidates from applications received;
Interviewing candidates;
Hiring them.

A lot of that could be done by a machine. That would make the management team free to focus on the things that machines can’t do, such as figuring out how to make the company grow.

Services

Finding a solution, part 1

Workshopping for pain points

The very first task on our docket was understanding where the roadblocks were. Every company is different, and every team has different struggles. To understand what was getting in Arygest’s way, we sat every team member down and interviewed them. No one knows what the pain points are better than those who feel them.
We immediately identified a number of problems.

Here are some of the most important things we learned:

We can digitalise the advertisement of openings

There is absolutely no reason for people to be sending job opening emails or contacts in person.

Standard legal documents should be produced automatically

When you hire and dismiss a lot of people, legal documents need to be available ASAP.

Assigning materials needs to be automatic

EPIs (Personal Protection Equipment, or, in Portuguese, Equipamentos de Proteção Individual) are to be delivered to every worker in every site, depending on what’s needed. This was done via a paper form every single time. There’s no reason this shouldn’t be digital, automatic, and affixed to the contract from the get-go.

Management shouldn’t be doing data entry

Candidates are perfectly capable of entering their information themselves.

Former hires should be brought back

As long as they’re competent, bringing people back for several jobs allows the company to skip a lot of steps while hiring. And building strong relationships with good workers is a plus too.

This was more than enough information to come up with an MVP for this product, as well as some improvements to be included further down the line.

Application management;
Resource database management;
Worker list;
Contract management;
Platform users management.

Finding a solution, part 2.1

Gathering data, building, testing

The technologies we picked to develop this practical and functional app were Laravel, Mysql and React.

The first item on our list was gathering data. Everything that had to do with this process needed to be brought to us. That meant every computer file, every piece of paper, everything.

That’s how we concocted the user stories we needed, which then led to the user flows necessary for every functionality. This allowed us to have a macro view of the effort necessary to get this job done, and wireframes and prototypes soon followed.

Whenever we’re working on a project like this, testing is key. Whenever we felt we were getting somewhere, we made a point of testing our ideas directly with the people who would be using the software in the future. This testing, and the feedback it produced, allowed us to make surgical changes to our wireframes.

Finding a solution, part 2.2

Ensuring the solution can handle real-world volumes

As you’ve probably gathered by now, the volumes of data we were handling were quite large. The API we were making needed to be robust. We had (as always) budgetary constraints to think of, so we needed to prioritise. We used a framework called Ant Design, that we had used successfully in the past, to save us time and effort building the frontend of the piece. This allowed us to maximise the time we had for the backend and create the API this project deserved.

Finding a solution, part 2.3

Adapting the solution to all kinds of contracts

While user management presented no hiccups, dealing with contracts was a little more of a challenge. The simple fact that projects were happening in very different countries, with workers who were nationals of very different countries as well, meant we were dealing with… very different legal requirements. We developed a series of contract templates that would both contemplate a set of predetermined conditions within the system, but were also flexible enough to respond to Arygest’s needs.

Outcome

What once took three weeks now takes two days.

The project would be launched after a few months of development. The first few iterations were completed thanks to the Arygest team’s feedback, and we were off to the races.

Training the team to use the software was exceedingly quick. It took only a 30 minute-long training session, and a speedy learning curve. Soon, the whole process was being run by Untile’s software.

The hiring process no longer took two to three weeks. It was shortened to two to three days. And that’s to say nothing of the drastic reduction in labour hours for the team.

The investment Arygest made represented just three years of their standard software’s license, without factoring in any costly add-ons.

What once took three weeks now takes two days.

Arygest have been kind enough to tell us about the improvements they felt by using Untile’s software, and here are some highlights:

Huge stress relief for the team, freed from repetitive tasks;
Better productivity for a team that can now dedicate itself to high-value tasks;
90% of every application is now filled in by the candidate;
30 to 40 contracts can now be generated every two to three days;
PDF contracts being sent digitally avoids a vast number of unnecessary movements by the team to acquire signatures on paper;
Over 15.000 sheets of paper are saved yearly;
No extra expenses on maintenance and support, which Untile ensures;
New and better features continuously added by Untile