How HR tech brings the people community together

When locally owned and operated consulting company, K3 Consulting started thinking about how to grow their reach, HR Assist came about as the solution. This new product would act as the solution to being able to extract the extensive HR knowledge from their team of industry leaders and work it into something digestible and easy to access for clients.

The company recognised that a lot of business leaders really wanted to self-learn, self-direct and access information for themselves, but with a guiding hand at the ready. “They want to have that confidence and capability to deal with these issues and they don't always want to be asking questions, they want to be able to access information themselves, said K3 Senior Consultant, Karyn Gould.

“Initially we thought, there's a whole lot of experience that we have through many years in the HR field,” she continued. “Let's turn our expertise into something easy to access for clients. And then that became something much bigger. We realised, actually we can use these insights to support the HR industry as well”.

The development of the technology started pre-covid and when the pandemic hit, the company hadn’t officially brought the product to market but had a few companies on board. COVID gave them the opportunity to work with those companies to develop and refine the offering and establish what worked, what didn’t work and how to provide companies with real value.

“What we realised more and more over COVID, was people want that personal touch. So, the tools give them the capability, and the conversation gives them the confidence to be able to go forward and know that when they’re having a conversation with an employee, that it’s a good quality conversation from an engagement perspective. But it also helps them from a risk perspective as well,” said Gould.

While there is a plethora of HR software solutions available, K3 Consulting saw the opportunity to develop something that’s quite different. “It’s around customisation and personalisation. Firstly, our proposition is “service supported with software, not the other way around. All our toolkits can be customised to each client, and this all means we can provide more of a spectrum of HR needs, everything from strategy through to operational elements, not just small operational tasks,” explained Gould.

 The HR Assist platform also caters not just to businesses but to HR practitioners as well. HR practitioners can fully customise the software with documents that have their clients branding on it, they can take the tools provided and use them as is, add to them or even change them.

“There are many great HR practitioners around New Zealand operating small businesses themselves and we’ve opened our tool up to them and said you can take our tools and all the development and use it for your clients,” said Gould. “It’s kind of like Xero but for the HR industry”.

The company has garnered a lot of great feedback from their clients already. “The toughest critic is always going to be your own profession,” said Gould. “So, making this available to HR partners was nerve-wracking. But we’ve had such great feedback from them – they see the value in it, and we’ve had more partners come on board so that’s been really great to see.