PDF Butler Establishes Growth-Ready HR Processes

Serving Up Smooth Document Management on Salesforce

The team at PDF Butler provide solutions to automate and streamline processes related to digital documents. From document generation, storage, and collaboration to e-signatures and customized forms, the company’s products simplify document management on Salesforce.

Founded in Belgium, PDF Butler stands out from other document management providers thanks to its constant innovation and focus on the Salesforce ecosystem. “If you think about documents on Salesforce, then you can think about our suite of products,” says Luke White, Operations Director at PDF Butler. “Combining those products can create a really smooth, user-friendly experience for the end customer, but also the user in the Salesforce org.”

PDF Butler has since expanded from its Belgian beginnings and now has people in the UK, the US, Germany, and Japan. Today, its workforce is 100% remote – but they still regularly meet in person. Visits to Salesforce events provide a good opportunity for the employees to connect and speak face to face.

In HR, where collaboration and personal interactions are crucial, PDF Butler was lacking a dedicated solution. This meant that the team used a number of programs, such as Microsoft Teams, Excel, and SharePoint, to handle its core HR processes. “The different parts of HR like absences, holidays, and performance reviews were all a bit disjointed,” explains Luke. This is one of the reasons PDF Butler decided to implement flair.

A Phased Approach for Smoother Implementation

With flair, PDF Butler aimed to bring more structure to its HR processes and facilitate collaboration between its remote teams. In addition to core HR features, the company opted for the flair Recruiting add-on.

Another reason why PDF Butler decided to work with flair was the fact that the HR solution is built on Salesforce. “Using the Salesforce backend that we’re used to in our day-to-day life has been very beneficial,” says Luke. “I don’t necessarily have to jump into another system. From a continuity point of view, adoption has been very easy.”

Apart from the company’s experience with Salesforce, PDF Butler also receives support from flair’s Customer Success to ensure that they hit the ground running. “The help and support we got from the team was fantastic,” says Luke. “Having it broken down into phases was super beneficial. And I knew they were always there on the phone or via email if I got lost.”

PDF Butler required little training to become familiar with flair. Thanks to the user-friendly UI, non-HR users found the Employee Hub intuitive from the start. “It’s nicely designed,” explains Luke. “The UI is clean and super easy to use. Even employees that don’t need to use it every day can easily jump back in and know exactly what they’re doing.”

Efficient Talent Acquisition Processes

As PDF Butler continues to expand, the company is using flair to streamline its recruitment process. This starts with a new flair career page that will be added to the company website. Applicants who apply for a job on this page will be saved in the flair Recruiting app on Salesforce, where hiring managers can evaluate them and progress them through the process.

Reflecting on PDF Butler’s recruitment process, Luke says, “We used to evaluate candidates in a shared document and have conversations over Microsoft Teams. But information could sometimes get lost in these chats. Now, after a job interview, I can provide feedback in flair so other hiring managers can view my notes and prepare for the next round of interviews. That’s been a massive benefit.”

More Structured and Transparent Absences and Performance

Implementing flair has helped PDF Butler organize its information and make it easier to find. “We didn’t have anything like this before,” explains Ivonne Sarmiento, a Solutions Consultant at PDF Butler. “Absence requests were manual. We didn’t have consolidated information and it was difficult to find out what was going on with other teammates.”

Using flair’s absence management features, PDF Butler employees can now easily submit requests for vacation or sick leave. They can view their remaining vacation days and check the absence calendar to see which employees are on leave. This helps improve capacity planning, even within a geographically dispersed team.

flair has also helped PDF Butler to bring more structure to its performance review process. In the past, managers used Microsoft Word to evaluate employee performance. “That didn’t really result in a trackable process with any real accountability,” explains Luke. “Now this year, we used flair to do our mid-year reviews of everybody and get everyone’s feedback. It’s a much more collaborative approach to performance reviews, like it should be.”

PDF Butler has also used flair surveys to gather feedback from different teams and improve collaboration. “That’s been great so far,” says Luke. “We can now see the feedback collected in one place.”

As the Team Grows, So Does the Software

Luke White is convinced that switching to flair was the right choice for PDF Butler as the company grows. “Making these steps is important as we grow,” he says. “When you’re managing four or five people, you can get by in Excel and Word documents. But with 10, 20, or 30 people, it becomes challenging. That’s where flair definitely helped us save an awful lot of time and make the whole process much more user-friendly for everybody, both employees and managers, across the whole company.”

PDF Butler is continuing to find exciting new ways to use flair to improve its HR processes. We’re really enjoying working with them and seeing their HR develop, and we can’t wait to see what’s next.

If you’re looking to establish efficient and collaborative HR processes as your business grows, book a free flair demo today.