Darwinbox HR

Despite widespread automation and technological advancements, humans continue to be the most valuable resource for organizations. Thus recruiting, training, developing, and maintaining the right talent is crucial to organizational success. The above processes are far more critical than they might appear. To add to it, multiple ancillary human resources processes (e.g., talent management, employee finances, rewards, travel and expense management, performance management, etc.) need to be streamlined simultaneously. 

Human resource management problems are far more complicated for large-scale enterprises as they have to deal with many employees distributed across multiple sectors, business entities, locations and nationalities, dealing with diverse processes, unique org structures, and numerous data interactions within the enterprise ecosystem. Streamlining attendance, expenses, travel, hiring, performance, and compensation while ensuring efficiency and engagement is daunting. This is the reason for the growth of integrated Human Capital Management (HCM)  Software.

Today, there are tons of HCM software platforms available in the market, but only a select few are built to handle the scale and complexity of large enterprises. Furthermore, most platforms were designed for the west, adopting a fairly standardized approach to HR processes. However, unlike western corporations, Asia is home to multi-sectoral conglomerates and the youngest workforce in the world. With most legacy software created in the early 2000s, these platforms don’t solve the changing needs of fast-evolving enterprises in emerging markets such as Asia and South America. The user experience is clunky and often built for desktop users, while most users in emerging markets access technology via smartphones.

These problems have bothered several conglomerates in developing nations that were considering moving towards digitally transforming. Thankfully, today, HRMS systems address all of the above concerns and successfully integrate various human resource functions. This review will focus on Darwinbox, a modern-age premier HCM software that allows enterprises to empower and engage their employees. 

This review will cover the following points: 

So let’s get right to it!

Introduction to Darwinbox

Darwinbox is a SaaS-based HRMS software designed to help conglomerates unify and simplify multiple human resource functions. The software automates several HR processes and lets you digitalize and automate the employees’ complete lifecycle using its centralized platform. The platform allows corporations to manage and develop their distributed workforce and improve productivity, efficiency, and collaboration. 

Darwinbox was founded in August 2015 to help enterprises manage and streamline multiple HR-related tasks on a single platform. Rather than using various disparate applications and software for individual HR tasks and processes, it allows you to bring all your tasks under a single data shed.

This end-to-end HRMS software allows you to view your company’s functional and organizational structure and enables you to configure it according to your organization’s unique needs. The software allows for role-based access for employees and HR managers to get their tasks done and takes care of the following six essential HRMS functions through various sub-modules:

• Core HR: This includes all employee data from joining to the release of an employee, workflows, and workforce planning.
• Talent Acquisition: This includes talent search, sourcing, screening,  selection, and onboarding of employees.
• Talent Management: It deals with employee performance, engagement, development, and organizational rewards and recognition.
• Workforce Management: Darwinbox also includes modules to take care of employees’ leaves, attendance and timings. It also has a dedicated ‘Helpdesk’ module for employees’ assistance and provides them with the necessary support.
• Employee Financials & Reimbursements: This includes the employees’ financial components like payroll, travel expenses, and reimbursements.
• Reports & Analytics: Darwinbox has several modules to manage employees’ data and provide useful insights through reports and dashboards. You can also use it for MIS operations and creating custom reports.

Darwinbox caters to everyone in the organization, from the CEO to the shop floor operator, by bringing these processes on a single integrated platform. On Darwinbox, employees can update their data, apply for leaves, make requests, find assigned tasks, and view several types of information related to their compensation, reimbursements, applications, and performance. Similarly, administrators can use this platform to easily update organizational policies, restructure departments, provide approvals, evaluate performance, track processes, and analyze data quickly.

What makes Darwinbox ideal for modern enterprises?

Today, Darwinbox is the biggest challenger to global legacy solutions, with over 1 million employees using it in more than 500 global enterprises across 60 countries. The application soars over its competition through its impressive engagement and adoption rates. This is achieved through its intuitive UI and mobile-first experience. 

Darwinbox also comes with a super lite (just 7MB) mobile application that enables employee self-service on both Android and iOS. The application has two-factor authentication and houses an intelligent chatbot that can understand voice commands. The chatbot can process direct keywords and take action on them. Moreover, the AI voice bot software can draw logical conclusions based on responses. For example, if an employee informs the voice bot that they are “not feeling well,” the app automatically takes them to its ‘Apply Leaves’ section. The Darwinbox app is available in over 22 languages for quick adoption and enables users to add voice attachments from their smartphones. 

Darwinbox also features an organizational social network called ‘Vibe’ that helps employees connect and communicate with the HRs. This internal social networking tool allows employees to collaborate through functional and fun groups, greatly improving engagement. It also houses an organization mood board called ‘Pulse’ that helps employees review their day, assess their performance, and verify their biometrics and location on their mobile app.

To help HR managers eliminate the need for physical interaction, documentation, and verification, especially during the pandemic, Darwinbox has come up with a virtual onboarding module that interfaces directly with interviewees through a secure login. Candidates can accept job offers and upload their credentials online through the system. This module also incorporates vendors for the background verification of candidates. 

Darwinbox HR facilitates a seamless data flow between departments, automating several tasks and offering rich insights into organizational performance. The solution has gained widespread popularity and accolades in recent years and is currently used by several market leaders in the manufacturing, logistics, pharmaceutical, and insurance sectors, among others.

Let’s have a look at some of the major brands that rely on Darwinbox to simplify their HRMS operations:

Key Features of Darwinbox HR

Let us now delve deeper into some of the software’s best features to understand how it can help your organization make the most of its human resources. Here’s a list of the software’s key features:

1. Holistic Talent Acquisition

Darwinbox helps you source and hire the best talent by allowing you to launch jobs on multiple platforms. You can integrate the software to work with multiple career pages and add external recruiters. The system will enable you to define each role’s budget and tag vacant positions across multiple locations. You can set recruitment rules, create job descriptions, and create custom hiring workflows.

With features like AI-enabled stack ranking and resume parsing, Darwinbox helps you screen the best candidates. It also allows you to set pre-screening criteria for improved application filtering and conduct assessments with auto-scoring rules. The application also allows HR managers to delegate tasks, configure recruitment teams and provide special permissions.

Darwinbox also helps you conduct and schedule interviews and create custom evaluation forms for each assessment. You can trigger editable templates for emails, Whatsapp messages, induction videos, and company policies after or between interview stages and generate joining letters directly with digital signatures. You can choose from a range of 3rd party apps for job posting, resume parsing, social media, background screening, etc.

You can also use Darwinbox to create and analyze more than 150 standard HRMS reports and filter them at your convenience. You can also download PDF, Excel, or CSV format reports and schedule them to be generated at set intervals. This allows you to monitor employee activities, anticipate trends, and derive meaningful insights about your workforce.

2. Employee Performance Management

With organizations and teams so unique, one size cannot fit all, and Darwinbox understands that. Darwinbox allows you to choose one or combine multiple frameworks like the OKR, MBO, or Project-based Performance to get the best out of your teams. Darwinbox helps you know each of your employee's performance by tracking their progress on their goals. You can configure assessments and review cycles for different groups and create performance journals to gauge progress and provide feedback. The software helps you align organizational goals with that of employees through cascading goals, which can be viewed by organization, department, and designation.

Since conglomerates have multiple stakeholders whose feedback is required before making critical decisions, the application allows the creation of review cycles and feedback from multiple user groups within an organization using the M.S.F. (Multi-stakeholder feedback) option. 

Darwinbox also helps you keep track of your workforce’s competency in each department and designation through its competency library. There can be several competency tiers, and employees can be assigned to tasks based on their core competencies. 

Besides making appraisals easier through flexible and continuous feedback, it can also help your organization revise employee compensation and bonus distribution as per employee ratings. This enables you to retain and utilize your workforce more effectively and recompense them according to their efficiency, performance, and skills.

Using compensation modelling on Darwinbox, you can automate compensation budgeting to be linked to performance ratings. You can also allocate budgets for different departmental levels. HR personnel can model employee increments per their allocated funds and compare internal and external compensation ratios to curb attrition.

3. Employee Rewards & Recognition

Being recognized for their efforts boosts employees’ morale and creates a sense of belongingness in them. Darwinbox has a dedicated module for social recognition in its social networking application that brings employees together through social media updates, gamified badges, and competitive leaderboards.

Darwinbox is highly configurable and offers the ability to design peer-to-peer recognition or nomination program, helping employees recognize the exceptional efforts of their peers. The application also helps you plan your R&R budgets per event and department, allowing you to spend wisely on each program.

Here are a few employees reward programs that you can configure almost instantly through Darwinbox:

4. Travel & Expense Management:

Managing travel expenses and adjusting them with finance teams is a tough task for conglomerates due to the organization’s sheer size. This is why Darwinbox helps you customize travel expenses and reimbursement based on employee role and grade. The application supports multiple currencies and enables you to define units for employee reimbursement.

Darwinbox’s mobile application comes with an inbuilt optical character reader (OCR), so your employees can capture expenses on their smartphones from anywhere. You can also calculate their mileage based on their Google Maps check-ins and parse their receipts through a browser plugin. Employees can raise reimbursement, advance, and booking requests from their mobiles using the app and get them approved by managers.

Darwinbox also has an integration with Uber that automatically calculates the total distance travelled and the expenses incurred. It will also integrate with MakeMyTrip soon for managing long-distance travel for employees.

5. People Analytics

Darwinbox also helps you utilize employee data to derive key insights into your workforce. The software helps you get personalized views on various HRMS metrics and lets you personalize their interactive dashboards and reports. You can drill down on data according to departments, teams, and business verticals.

These insights help you manage expenditures better and improve your employee management approach. You can also create customized rosters and reports based on ad-hoc MIS needs and schedule custom templates to be shared periodically with a group of users based on their roles.

6. Scaling, security, and compliance

Darwinbox is certified according to AWS security standards and is also compliant with GDPR standards. It is approved by ISO 90001, ISO 27001, and SOC Type 2 standards and has OSWAP’s ten proactive controls to ensure data and server security. It also provides resizable computing capacity through the use of Elastic Compute Cloud, making it auto-scalable. It also provides you with data management and policies that are fully configurable.

Apart from the above, Darwinbox also has an efficient ticket management system with multi-tier escalations and SLAs, an offline attendance registration system for attendance filling in remote areas, and a dedicated module for merit planning and management.

The Final Verdict

Darwinbox is a unique HCM platform that offers end-to-end integration of multiple HR functions for improved administration, productivity, and engagement. It allows users to customize workflows, policies, and fields according to organizational needs and is highly scalable. It empowers organizations and employees through technology and requires little time, cost, and infrastructure for successful implementation. The platform offers a flexible pricing model based on the company size and modules chosen. Thus, you can pay for the exact number of modules you need and will be using.

Darwinbox is recognized and advocated by several industry experts and is a breath of fresh air in the HRMS domain, which is overridden by on-premise, legacy, and small function-specific applications. Conglomerates across sectors can benefit from using Darwinbox by utilizing its rich set of features and insights offered.

You can learn more about Darwinbox from its website or SoftwareSuggest Product Profile Page.