Busuu supports business growth with Cezanne OnDemand

April 29, 2014 - PRLog -- Language learning specialists Busuu are using on-line HR solution Cezanne OnDemand to support their rapid business growth.

Busuu is the world’s largest on-line learning community with more than 40 million users in 200 countries. Thanks to an innovative model which allows learners to practice their language skills with native speakers, the business has seen significant growth, quadrupling staff numbers in the last two years.

Busuu had previously been managing HR processes across a series of spreadsheets, but found that as staff numbers grew, this quickly became impractical. Head of Talent Jennifer Mullen began to look around for a Cloud-based solution that would significantly reduce admin and allow the company to hold all HR-related data in one central place.

After drawing up a shortlist, she opted for Cezanne OnDemand because of its easy-to-use format, cost-effective pricing model and the opportunity for customers to tailor aspects of the system to fit with their existing internal processes.

“We also liked the fact that it was a European company,” explained Jennifer. “A lot of the other solutions we looked at were very US-centric and just didn’t make sense in a European setting.”

It took Busuu just a week to get up and running with the software. Cezanne OnDemand managed the data transfer and after a one day training session, Jennifer was able to run an internal briefing to familiarise managers and employees with the new system.

The company is now holding all employee data on the system and is using it to record and manage holiday and sickness absence. Jennifer says it is already saving her “hours of time” on a weekly basis. “Previously we were regularly having to update information in at least three different places, whereas now we only have to do it once which makes everything so much quicker,” she says.

Busuu is currently working with Cezanne OnDemand to use the system’s configuration options to tailor some of the features in the performance management module so that they reflect the company’s existing process and plan to roll this out in the near future. “Employees will be able to do self-evaluations on-line and all the necessary documents will be in one place which will make everything so much easier,” she said.

Looking further ahead, Jennifer also plans to use the HR analytics Cezanne OnDemand is able to generate to help monitor performance levels and manage the compensation review process.

“The reaction from people so far has been extremely positive and it will definitely help us to reduce admin drama so that we can concentrate on value-adding activities instead,” she said.

About Busuu

We are the largest social network for language learning, with more than 40 million users worldwide. We offer free and premium paid-for access to audio-visual courses for 12 languages: Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and English.

The company is named after the Busuu language of Cameroon. According to an ethnological study from the 1980s, Busuu is spoken by only 8 people!