Almost every other HRIS and payroll company views Stated slightly di昀昀erently: if a new hire were to mis- the world this way. ADP is the largest payroll company enter their Social Security Number into Rippling, it in the US by market cap, and they make most of their would be wrong everywhere — in payroll, with insur- revenue not selling payroll — but by selling a host of ance carriers, with the 401k provider, etc. ADP add-on services (time tracking, performance management, benadmin, etc) that happen to plug in As a result of this, we are uniquely fanatical about to the core ADP payroll system. Certainly Zene昀椀ts, employee onboarding software. For our competitors, Gusto, and Namely also count this as a part of their employee onboarding tools may be useful features, strategy. helpful to clients. But for us, onboarding software is the only thing that matters, because if you win at Outside of HR, this is also Microsoft’s strategy in onboarding, you win everything else. their enterprise business segment. Microsoft’s Active Directory is also a system of record for employee data Eventually, though, if we’re successful, other compa- — just one that happens to be used by the IT depart- nies will come around to our point of view on the cen- ment instead of the HR department. Microsoft brings tral role this software will play in the B2B ecosystem, Active Directory into a company, and then upsells the and will refocus their own e昀昀orts to develop employee company on other Microsoft services — Exchange onboarding software. The question then becomes, Server, Sharepoint, Windows PCs — that plug cleanly “how do you win at employee onboarding software?” in to Active Directory. Part III - To win at employee onboarding, you can’t So, many companies agree that being the system of be monogamous to any single department or record for employee data is valuable, and Rippling functional area. is not the only company gunning for this prize. The question then becomes, how do you “win” at being the Many companies maintain informal checklists of the system of record for employee data? tasks they need to complete when hiring a new em- ployee. To win at onboarding, you need to automate more of a company’s new hire checklist than anyone Part II - Onboarding Software makes you the else. system of record for employee data. But, these onboarding tasks cut across many di昀昀er- There is a button you click in Rippling to hire an ent departments — it’s our experience that about employee. As a hiring manager, you tell us the new 30% of a company’s onboarding tasks are HR-related. employee’s Salary, Manager, Department, Work Loca- About 40% are IT-related. And there’s a smattering of tion, and a few other things. Finance, Legal, and Facilities-related tasks that need to be completed for every new hire, as well. Rippling then reaches out to the new hire, generates their paperwork for electronic signature, and then If your company’s mission is to make HR software, or asks the employee for details like their Social Security to build software for the Finance department, or the Number, Home Address, and Bank Account Number. IT organization, you can only solve a portion of this onboarding problem — because the onboarding pain These hiring and onboarding 昀氀ows are the way this that businesses have isn’t speci昀椀c to one department new employee object is assembled. Rippling is collect- or functional area. ing each of the employee attributes that make up this employee record, we are writing them to our data- To e昀昀ectively solve employee onboarding, you have to base, and then we are metering them out to all of our orient your product around employee lifecycle events clients’ downstream business systems. — getting hired, getting a new job or role, moving to a new address, getting promoted, leaving the company By virtue of being the ingestion point for this employ- — and follow the downstream implications of these ee data, and because we are upstream of everyone lifecycle events wherever they lead. else in this process, Rippling is the system of record by de昀椀nition. Because every other business system is receiving its information about the company’s employees from us, we become the de facto source of truth. 3 Rippling Memo
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