Interview With Factorial HR Software

TechRound recently interviewed Factorial, a cloud-based HR-Software Start-up founded in Barcelona in the summer of 2016 by Pau Ramon, Bernat Farrero and Jordi Romero. Their mission is to help companies make better business decisions based on people data. This means solving HR administrative problems is only the start. It is, according to the company, a necessary step “in freeing HR leaders and managers in general, so instead of wasting time on overhead and administration, they can focus on what really matters: developing and growing their people.”

What is the Idea Behind the Business?

So, our business idea is to acquire a company’s interest, basically through inbound marketing, meaning companies find us rather than the other way around. We then show them we can solve all their people problems and have a platform which generates useful people data. Then, we allow these companies to sign up and try our product for free with the possibility to upgrade. This is called free-trial software-as-a-service model, where we charge a fee per employee per month, which is around 3-4 euros, with a potential discount available for very large organisations.

Who Are The Brains Behind The Company?

Jordi Romero is a computer engineer, previously founder and CTO of Redbooth, a project management start-up between Barcelona and San Francisco. Now, he is currently leading a team of 77 people to become the most used software for medium-sized companies around the world, to manage their people. The founders, who are engineers, discussed how they could solve the problems they are faced with. If you combine these problems with a market that is basically universal in B2B, because any company that has one employee, has some sort of HR, it makes the potential market size of this business idea huge.

So, the founders decided from day one that they didn’t want to limit themselves to one specific geography, Jordi Romero: “Although HR is quite local, we knew we wanted to find a way to have global impact with this idea.” They also decided that from the whole spectrum of companies that exist, the tiniest ones, let’s say 0-50 employees, can sort of figure everything out by sitting together around a table and talking things through. After your company expands to 50, 100, 200+ employees, there is just no way of having good visibility of everything going on.

Factorial is an example of this, Jodi Romero: “We just grew from 25 to 75 people very fast and I just don’t even know everybody’s names anymore, especially with the current coronavirus situation where we can’t see each other face to face in the office, which is challenging. We’re kind of having to do different exercises to solve that.”

The HR Market Has So Many Software Providers, So What Made You Enter The Market?

Pau, Bernat and Jordi previously had executive positions in fast growing companies and soon became very frustrated there was no technology to help them scale their organisation or to develop and recruit the best talent available. Great tools existed for scaling your sales organisation, marketing strategies and even to help with finance, but there was nothing to help develop talent. Therefore, the three engineers did some research and saw some upcoming US-centric providers, very small start-ups in Silicon Valley growing quickly, but nothing that would help really solve the problem of a medium sized company globally. Jordi Romero: “So, as we knew how to build software, we felt this pain, and we saw a massive market opportunity, so we decided to start Factorial.”

 

So far, our expansion has been successful. During 2017, we started working with hundreds of small companies mostly around Spain. Then in 2018 we started growing to having hundreds of companies of 100+ employees.  Then, during 2019 we made the jump to acquire customers in over 40 countries, all the way from 10 employees to 1,200 employees, from mainly different parts of Europe and America. We aim to continue this expansion.

What Does Factorial Bring To The Industry?

HR management and Human resources planning plays a strategic role in managing people and the workplace culture and environment. If effective, it can contribute greatly to the overall company direction and the accomplishment of its goals and objectives. Nowadays, successful companies need to be adaptive, resilient, customer-centred and quick to change direction. Within these fast-paced environments, the effectiveness of HRM is crucial, that’s why Factorial is here, to help these companies improve all of their HR management so they are on the right path to success.

Imagine if you are a company with 250 people, how can you assume you have strong visibility of what’s going on in your company, in general? What about even larger and more complex organisations? Due to the complexity of these larger organisations, there is a lot of work being done with massive players such as Oracle, SAP and so on, which have been working on integrating personalised operating systems and ERPs, to adapt to every process in their company.

Therefore, we focused on these medium sized companies, the ones that start having fundamental issues due to a lack of visibility on their people data and can find lots of value in an extremely intuitive, easy-to-use solution like Factorial, without having to go to the large enterprises.

What Problems Does Factorial Fix For Those In HR And Why Use It?

The company was created to organise tasks and solve problems that are normally faced by human resource managers. We help businesses streamline their HR processes and chores by using a free HR software. The software makes time consuming and difficult processes a breeze, keeping everyone motivated at work!  All HR processes are automated through integrating the following features:  Time Off Management, Time Tracking Payroll Summary, Document Management, Digital Signature Applicant Tracking System, Employee Onboarding and Performance Management.  Here is a sneak peak of our software and all its features:

factorial-software

What Are Your Plans For The Future?

Our vision is that everybody in an organisation is able to make smart business decisions based on data, something that we were not able to do before. In order to accomplish this, we need a massive spread with tons of companies using our software, Jordi Romero: “In 3 years, we want at least a million users / employees interacting with our application on a daily basis.” We want to carry on expanding and get around enough problems, so the quantity and quality of data we are able to expose is really useful to make business decisions. We definitely want to make a huge global impact, which is part of our company mission in general.

How Can We Find You?

You can reach out to us on our company website, where you will find information about the software we offer, all the features, contact details and how to sign up: https://factorialhr.co.uk/.  Our Barcelona office is located at this address: Calle Àlaba, 61 08005 Barcelona where someone is always happy to help! You can contact us and get to know Factorial better on many platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub, Instagram and you can even watch our explainer videos on YouTube!  Find all the info needed to contact us on our company website.