How Assystem Gets New Hires Mobilized Two Weeks Faster

The Challenge: When Complexity Delays New Hire Productivity

For a global engineering consultancy like Assystem, bringing on new talent isn’t just about an employee start date—it’s about accelerating time to productivity on critical client projects. Every day of delay in the onboarding process means lost billable hours, strained client relationships, and a competitive disadvantage.

Prior to partnering with Enboarder, the business recognised that their existing onboarding tool couldn’t keep pace with the business’s increasing complexity.

The Breaking Points

Pre-employment Complexity at Scale
Assystem’s diverse workforce—comprising contractors, permanent staff, and international mobility candidates—each requires dynamic pre-employment checks. Their legacy system offered only one rigid workflow, forcing teams to manually manage multiple high-stakes processes. “We had to look for information in multiple places and then pull them together,” says Kristof Geczi (HRIS Specialist).

Operational Drag Across the Business
HR, Recruiting, and Business Resource Managers (BRMs) lacked visibility into the overall onboarding progress, leading to constant firefighting. Allie recalls the “constant weekly meetings just to figure out: ‘Where are we with this person? Is this person still on track to start here?'”.

This meant their talent acquisition team and numerous BRMs spent hours each week in status update meetings instead of focusing on strategic hiring.

Email Avalanche
On top of all that, various support teams were drowning in direct emails, taking precious time away from the actual work at hand. Every question, every missing document, every status check came through unstructured channels.

The Impossible Hires
Umbrella contractors—a critical talent pool for specialised projects—couldn’t be onboarded in the previous system, forcing entirely manual workarounds.

The Real Cost of Delayed Productivity

Beyond operational frustration, the business impact was high. Engineers waiting for confirmation couldn’t contribute to billable projects, extending the time to productivity. New hires remained in onboarding limbo instead of doing productive work, while project timelines slipped and non-value-added work took time away from focusing on the human connection.

The team knew they needed more than a document collection point. Their goal was clear: create a dynamic, personalised onboarding experience that could flex based on the hire, simplify processes for key stakeholders, accelerate new-hire productivity, and embed Assystem’s culture from the start.

The Solution: Making Complexity Simple

The Assystem HRIS team collaborated with Enboarder to design and launch three core, highly complex, year-long workflows in just 12 weeks:

1. UK-Based Candidates with bespoke processes
2. International Mobility with cross-border compliance needs
3. Umbrella Contractors who can now be onboarded via an automated process

The sheer scale of customisation was immense. Each workflow contained dozens of sequences and even more modules to build out and think through. “I think we were up to 80+ sequences in the workflow,” Allie Pawezowski (UK HRIS Manager) mentioned, laughing about their initial workflows all built out in Enboarder.

Seamless Integration & Real-Time Control

The key to unlocking efficiency was integration. Kristof led the technical implementation, connecting Enboarder to their Smart Recruiter ATS for automatic candidate data flow, along with five other critical systems—from the IT Service Desk to right-to-work checks software. The team is also actively working on integrating with their HRIS system to remove the need for manually duplicating data.

This streamlined approach meant that recruiters no longer had to remember “to do everything manually.” For the People team, real-time control was transformational.

“The best part of having this is that we can go in and change that. We can do it in real time, which is just amazing for us.”

 

— Allie Pawezowski, UK HRIS Manager

The Impact: Accelerating New Hire Productivity by Two Weeks Per Hire

The move to Enboarder immediately yielded quantifiable time savings and massive boosts to operational efficiency and employee experience—directly improving time to productivity across the organisation.

Faster Time to Productivity

The most crucial metric for Assystem—where new hire productivity is directly tied to project delivery—saw a dramatic shift:

“The actual time it took from offer acceptance until the required pre-employment checks have been completed and confirmed by the security team took 26 days within our previous system. In Enboarder, it takes 12.”

 

— Kristof Geczi, HRIS Specialist

This two-week acceleration in time-to-productivity for every single new hire means engineers could contribute to client projects earlier, delivering faster time to revenue for the business while improving resource deployment to support aggressive growth. This is now our key focus, and we are working with operations to embed the change.

By the Numbers

For Assystem’s leadership, the impact extended beyond process improvements; Enboarder fundamentally changed how the business operates day-to-day. By removing the administrative weight of onboarding, project teams were freed to redirect their energy toward client delivery, rather than being slowed by internal coordination.

The streamlining of security onboarding converted what had previously been dead time into productive project hours. With real-time visibility across each new hire’s journey, the business gained the confidence to plan ahead and mobilise new starters swiftly — a shift that Andrew Bedford, Senior Business Unit Director at Assystem, described as “transformational for our business operations.”

Trickle-down effects across the board

For the support teams, the dynamic workflows provided information in a clear, easy-to-read format, allowing them to focus on the task rather than requesting further information from various different places or fielding constant emails. As one of the Support Services Assistants described, “it gives us the time and space we need to concentrate on the actual task, because all of the noise has gone”.

Recruiters and Business Resource Managers can now see real-time dashboards whenever required, saving significant time requesting updates on each individual’s onboarding status.  During user acceptance testing, the BRMs captured the sentiment perfectly: “Just in the Enboarder trial, it is wonderful.”; “Hopefully will make things much easier for everybody.”; “It’s 100% smoother and also more streamlined”.

With the elimination of status meetings for the People Team and manual data entry, Assystem recovered substantial administrative capacity. This allowed the team to bring on a dedicated onboarding administrator who now handles day-to-day onboarding operations—a role that wouldn’t have been sustainable under the old system. By automating administrative tasks, the team could shift focus to more value-added activities.

The result? Positive feedback came almost immediately, with one new starter sending a message: “Well done for the onboarding pack because this has been one of the smoothest inductions I’ve ever had.”

What’s Next? Expanding the People-Centric Vision

Having found success in core onboarding, the HRIS team is actively rolling out multiple new workflows, cementing Enboarder as a key part of their entire employee lifecycle strategy. They’re working on offboarding to ensure streamlined exit processes, long-term leave workflows for maternity, paternity, and long-term sickness, a wellbeing workflow focused on employee mental health, and a dedicated line manager workflow to empower managers with the right tools at the right time.

Enboarder has evolved from an onboarding solution to a comprehensive employee lifecycle platform, supporting Assystem’s goal to digitalise operations while keeping people at the centre.

Now, instead of spending their days requesting information, the People Team are focusing on what matters most—helping new hires become productive, connected to their teams, and engaged with the broader business.

…and isn’t that really the goal?

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