Our processes were quite manual and spread across multiple systems. In a school environment, that meant lots of spreadsheets and emails back and forth — and particularly during peak recruitment season, it was high volume and quite unmanageable. To ensure consistency and compliance, and to make sure our candidates and staff had the right experience, I was determined to put in a proper HRIS and improve things significantly.

The first was the dynamic organisational chart. We always had someone calling or emailing asking for the org chart, and it was always something I had to update manually — that feature alone was a major reason we chose Martian. The second was a self-service portal where employees could go in themselves and sign things electronically. And the third was video interviews — we wanted to save time during recruitment, and that was a big selling point for us.

It was really about how flexible and willing the team were during implementation to customise the platform to us. I didn't want to have to convince our team to change their workflows. Martian allowed us to customise the implementation to how we already work. That distinction matters enormously — you're not asking people to adapt to a system; you're adapting the system to your people.

It made things more centralised, and because we have more than one site, it gave us much better visibility across the full employee life cycle. It reduced a lot of the manual admin — I wasn't sleeping properly because of all the manual processes, and now Martian just handles the recruitment and onboarding for me. It's more professional, more structured, and it looks better to candidates. And most importantly, it's more compliant — there's no room to miss a step, which in an organisation like ours is critical.

We used to have to go back to a candidate with a manual calculation — and that's something not all HR people love doing. You'd have to go to your payroll person or your finance person to get the numbers right. Now, when we're inputting the requisition at the very start of recruitment, we already have an estimate. And then when it comes to the contract, there's an exact amount — it's clear what a candidate will be paid whether they're working 37 weeks or 42 weeks a year. That certainty and speed makes a real difference to the candidate experience.

I was definitely quicker the second time because I knew the tag systems. There's a part of every implementation where you have to write your templates and your reminder emails, and if you don't already have that content sitting somewhere, it can slow everything down. Knowing how the tags work — so you can just let the system populate the right details automatically — made a big difference. An AI template writer that truly understood the tag system would be genuinely valuable for anyone coming into the platform fresh.

When comparing to other systems, I always say it's the team and the support — not just during implementation, but afterwards. I always have a response when I need one. If I do need to email support, I'll hear back within an hour at most. That speed matters because it means candidates who are in the middle of onboarding, particularly if they're dealing with something like a criminal history check, aren't left waiting. It frees us to focus on the next wave of people or our existing staff, knowing the candidates in onboarding are taken care of.