Interview with Nicolas Croix, Founder & CEO at Cloud-Based HR Platform: Moonworkers

Moonworkers is a cloud-based HR automation platform that removes the burden of administration and helps you find, recruit, manage and pay the best talent with ease. Moonworkers is built to solve common HR, payroll, and recruitment challenges, so you can focus on growing your business and unleashing the potential in people.
 
 
Launch of Moonworkers Payroll, UK - PR.com
 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
In 2019, I received a visit from my previous business partner, a film director based in Paris. Before I left our company to start a new career in digital production, we had produced several prime-time documentary series and filmed shows for French television. We discussed his current situation, specifically the challenges he encounters, and I realised they were still the same ten years on.

Firstly, finding new and accountable talent was still a challenge. In the film and TV industry, you don’t judge a technician based on their resume – human interactions and soft skills are equally important. Since you may spend a month or two working – and maybe living – continuously with a team immersed in a new location, it is very important to have a good feeling about the person you are hiring. Therefore, reputation and peer recommendations are an important aspect of the recruitment process of freelancers and temps. No online platform readily available offered a replicate of this process.

Secondly, when we were presenting our idea to a few broadcasters, we realised the problems were deeper. Onboarding, contracting, enrolment, HR operations and off-boarding employees is error-prone, repetitive and involves many stakeholders, making communication of information difficult, time-consuming, and costly. They complained about dealing with many unrelated apps, agencies and third parties that make their operations redundant and too expensive.
 

What sets you apart from competitors?

 
Offering economy of scale on people management activities is what drives Moonworkers’ roadmap. We natively integrate HR management, payroll, and a marketplace of talent that we source directly to allow people management software consolidation and automation whatever the employment status of employees so that you can cut out intermediaries. Unlike us, competitor solutions don’t integrate entirely with the three main verticals of HR. For instance, they offer to export or import payroll reports. Moreover, we don’t charge for hiring talent through our marketplace.
 

 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
Initially, our plan was to offer a free marketplace of talent of equal quality to the paid ones. During the pandemic, we realised that SMBs’ problems will become more complex than just sourcing the right talent at a lower cost. They will need to cut cost everywhere they can. Non-revenue generating activities are ideal candidates. We used the uncertain time to develop the product further, into an entire HR solution.
 

What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs?

 
One of the most important factors to appraise as an entrepreneur is your timing. Most of the mistakes we make arise because we make that decision either too early or too late. For example, when is it a good time to invest more in your website, a marketing campaign, content or develop that feature that you think your customers will want? The second factor, of course, is the availability of funds. They are many eBooks, articles, or pieces of training from supposedly successful entrepreneurs available that sell ready-made recipes to start an agile or profitable ‘before-you-start-it’ digital business.

In practice, that’s very rare. Otherwise, all entrepreneurs would be successful. In fact, one business out of a million starts to embrace the path described in those eBooks. So, don’t assume it will be yours. Only start your company if you think you can access enough funds to set up your business and cover some “unknown unknowns”, namely a few mistakes that you’ll make as part of the learning process. I guess one can be defined as risk-averse or risk-taker depending on how the funds they are lacking when igniting their entrepreneurial journey.
 

What can we hope to see from Moonworkers in the future?

 
Our ambition is to continue to make workforce management easier and cheaper for SMBs. We are currently developing an integrated time-tracker and rota management system to further offering software consolidation. In the long term, we plan to add some employee development and wellbeing features.