Sora has given the Plaid People Ops team the opportunity to deliver a better onboarding experience for their new hires, while getting half their week back from the time consuming tasks they used to do manually. Since Sora is able to integrate their HR tools, Plaid has clean data that they can trust all throughout their HR stack.
People Ops tasks were so tedious before Sora, now I can’t go back!
Plaid is a data network that powers the fintech tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. We work with thousands of fintech companies like Venmo and SoFi, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. Plaid’s network covers 11,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company was founded in 2013 by Zach Perret and William Hockey.
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We had so many systems that weren’t speaking to each other and the ability to connect all of them is huge.
“Sora gives us visibility into what our entire onboarding experience looks like, and that helps establish an understanding for what each new hire is going through, while also empowering us to make that experience better.”
Plaid knew how important it was to give their employees a great new hire experience, but as the onboarding process gets more complicated and fragmented, it becomes difficult for any one person on the onboarding team to truly understand the entire process. The continuous changes for new hires or new roles made it even harder.
“We collected all of this feedback from managers and new hires about the process, but it was hard to put solutions in place without doing a complete process overhaul, which we just didn’t have time for.”
With Sora, Plaid was able to consolidate the onboarding process into a shared space that allowed them to work together to improve it.
“We love how customizable it is to build surveys, emails, and assignments in Sora.”
As they worked through the process, QA testing it for different types of new hires, they were easily able to tweak and improve things.
“As we iterated through our process, it’s so helpful to see the entire onboarding experience from the employee’s perspective. It helped us identify parts of the process that might be confusing or where the communication could be better, and enabled us to make so many small, but meaningful improvements to our onboarding process.”
This has allowed the team to switch from being reactive to be proactive.
“We were so busy with the day-to-day operations and the manual tasks. All of our time was spent sending emails, slacks, and reminders. Following up with people and making sure our stakeholders had what they needed.”
“Now that we no longer have to think about these things, we're finally able to start thinking strategically.”
“In just an hour check-in with Sora every day, I can now easily do what used to take fifteen to twenty hours a week,” Molly says.
Plaid knew it didn’t want to abandon the people-focused onboarding experience, but when their new hire classes grew to thirty people, simple small tasks started consuming all of the People Ops teams’ time.
“It doesn’t seem like it’ll take very long. You’re just copying and pasting an email template for the new hire’s first day. Getting a date from a spreadsheet and pasting it in. Verifying an address with a new hire, then opening up a Jira ticket and pasting it in. Creating a new hire Slack channel and adding the entire class,” Molly says, recalling each ‘small’ manual task that was part of her onboarding process. “But altogether, with new hire classes getting larger and more frequent, it begins to take up all of your time.”
Managing and tracking all of those outstanding tasks and nuances for different new hires is exhausting.
“Before Sora, I was constantly keeping my own checklist of tasks that needed to get done, and having to remind myself of what I needed to do based on what day of the week it was. It was super stressful to have all these tasks hanging over my head. I was always afraid I’d forget something and it wouldn’t get done.”
But now, with Sora, Molly’s emails automatically get created, personalized with the right information, and sent at the right time.
“I don’t even have to think about the emails anymore. It saves so much time and gives me so much peace of mind. All of those things just get done. I’m still amazed when a new hire sends a reply to one of the emails that I didn’t even send myself.”
This has allowed the team to switch from being reactive to be proactive.
Surveys are getting automatically sent to new hires and their responses are used to automatically create Jira tickets. And the tasks that do need to be done in-person are all easily managed and can be marked as complete right in Sora.
“It was amazing when people started accepting their offers and all the data came in so cleanly,” Molly says. “It was such a relief.”
As an industry-leading People Ops organization, Plaid works with best-in-class HR tools. But those tools don’t always do the best job talking to each other.
“The limited way that Lever and ADP used to communicate actually caused more issues than it solved,” Molly says. “I was turning off our integrations because they were hurting us.”
When data was incorrectly sent, data errors cascaded through the system and were hard to correct. Duplicate accounts could be created, causing data fragmentation, and even employee login issues. All those issues lead Plaid to turning off integrations and entering data manually, which took a lot of time and caused a ton of headaches.
“There would be candidate data in our recruiting teams spreadsheet, then we double-checked it with the new hire in this other spreadsheet, and then I had to recheck everything and compiled it into another spreadsheet. It was so inefficient.”
Relying on manually inputted data from multiple people created incorrect and inconsistent data. Even for something as straightforward as an office location field or a job title. There are so many ways you can type a location: “San Francisco”, “SF”, “San Francisco, CA”, “San Francisco, California” – let alone all of the different variations of a job title.
But now with Sora, Plaid is able to actually move clean, trustworthy data through their HR stack.
“We’re seeing the positive results on our team, and now those are cascading down to other teams. So better data doesn’t just help us, but all of Plaid.”
“All these weird pain points are no longer happening,” Molly says. “Being able to just click on someone’s profile in Sora and see data that makes sense is so impactful.”
