All4Staff all about the act of reducing paperwork

Boulder startup All4Staff Inc. is after the heart of just about every human resources manager ever.

The company, founded by CEO David Secunda and chief technology officer Arthur Nisnevich, is a graduate of the most recent Techstars Boulder accelerator cohort, and has developed an online platform that helps companies streamline the onboarding of new employees.

Once a new hire has accepted a position, the company can enter that hire’s name and email address into the All4Staff system, which then automatically sends the person all of the paperwork that must be filled out. That employee completes it at home and hits the ground running on his or her first day of work. Photos of driver’s licenses and canceled checks for direct deposit purposes can be uploaded to the system from a smartphone.

The service costs $21 per new hire, and it’s free for companies to sign up.

All4Staff, which has four employees, is working through beta tests with the likes of Baskin Robins and Edible Arrangements now, but is already adding new customers.

Secunda is a veteran of Boulder’s entrepreneur scene. His most recent venture was Avid4Adventure, which conducts outdoor adventure camps for kids. But he also founded Planet Outdoors, a venture-backed outdoor e-commerce company, and was the first president at the Outdoor Industry Association.

BizWest caught up with Secunda recently to chat about All4Staff.

How did the idea for All4Staff come about?

The idea for All4Staff truly came from the pain we were experiencing at my last business, Avid4Adventure. We had to hire 250 people every year in just a few weeks, and each of those had to fill out 30 individual pieces of documentation because it was a regulated industry. Initially we were going to do some custom development. And then I started talking to colleagues in town who said that the pain was very much universal in the industry. So that’s when we decided to move forward and commercialize a solution.

What is the cost savings involved for companies?

The average cost to onboard an employee in the United States is about $103. That consists of three items: paying employees for their time, filing the paperwork, and data entering everything off of that paperwork. So all of those three costs we are able to basically eliminate (for the price of $21 per new hire). We’ve created a solution that the employees can do all of the forms at home on their own time. All of the data entry is performed within the onboarding process itself. Then of course there’s no filing because everything is digitally filed in the cloud.

What are the types of companies that benefit most from this?

Those that are hiring the most rapidly or the most cyclically … the hospitality industry, the camp industry, rafting industry, recreation, retail, halloween stores, call centers, transportation. And then there are companies that are rapidly hiring because they have high turnover or because they’re growing so quickly.

Does privacy come into play, and how has security been addressed?

We basically looked at best practices and integration of them from the very get-go, knowing that there’s a lot of sensitive information. So it’s something that is really a primary focus of our business, and I think we’ve done a really good job of that.

How big is the market for this, and what other potential applications are there beyond onboarding?

Our estimation is that U.S. employers are spending $5.5 billion every year on onboarding. And out of that workforce, there are 26 percent that are currently contingent employers. Although we’re entering with that most-acute pain of the onboarding process, we feel like there’s an incredible amount of value to be added to the contingent workforce as far as HR technology is concerned. So this is definitely just our first product, and we’ll be looking across that life cycle from online application to performance review and everything in between.

What was the biggest development for All4Staff that came out of Techstars?

It was an incredibly focused time both for us and folks around the table supporting us. It allowed us to take three months and I think provide a level of momentum that we just really couldn’t have done on our own outside the program.

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