paylocity case study
TRANSCRIPT
CASE STUDY:
Paylocity recruits & retains employees through an investment in learning
Pluralsight | Paylocity
Chicago-area based Paylocity, a
powerful payroll and human capital
management software, helps
thousands of human resource
departments coast to coast reduce
administrative burden and increase
insight into data analytics. By
delivering intuitive cloud technology
with a mobile-first philosophy,
Paylocity helps elevate payroll and HR
professionals from the backroom to
the boardroom. Of course, Paylocity
uses their tools in-house, helping keep
their own employees engaged and
informed. And they offer another not-
so-secret benefit to help technical and
creative employees grow their careers—
Pluralsight’s online training.
Pluralsight is the tech recruiter’s not-
so-secret weapon.
Competition for employees with the
right technical skills is fierce. Making
matters more difficult, Paylocity
doesn’t settle for just any programmer.
It hires remote engineers from across
the United States.
“The number one thing we look for in
candidates is the continued desire
to learn,” says Chelsey Madsen, a
technical recruiter at Paylocity.
To show job applicants the company is
serious about learning, they offer each
new employee a Pluralsight account
so they can explore, learn and grow.
Providing employees with the right
tools to learn and the time to use them
is a key recruiting tactic.
“It’s a huge selling tool for us to be
able to talk about employee access
to Pluralsight and our dedication to
having them use the training to learn
new skills,” says Laura Durfee, Technical
Recruiting Manager.
Many of the candidates interviewing
are already familiar with Pluralsight.
“Mentioning Pluralsight during the
recruiting process usually gets
an ‘Oh wow!’ reaction,” says Senior
Technical Recruiter Sam Rizvi. “For
most developers, it’s their number
one resource for increasing their
knowledge base and keeping
themselves up-to-date with
technology and new tools.”
Sam also tells us demonstrating the
company’s commitment to growing
employees’ careers during the
hiring process has reduced turnover.
“Retention has been very good. It’s
been amazing.”
Pluralsight helps increase interest from the right job seekers.
Does offering a benefit that costs less
than $50 per month per employee
really make a significant difference
Pluralsight is the benefit that technical and creative employees love
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Paylocity at a glance:
• Paylocity provides a customizable SaaS solution for managing a company’s payroll and human capital management
needs for mid-sized organizations.
• Paylocity has been named one of the Best Places to Work in Illinois five different times. The company has also been
ranked on the INC 5000 list of fastest growing companies in America 11 times since 2003.
• If you’re a fan of the PGA, Paylocity is proud to sponsor PGA up-and-comer Patton Kizzire and PGA legend Kenny Perry.
in choosing an employer? We asked
two of Paylocity’s recent hires to
find out. Quality Assurance Engineer
Amelio Wright told us, “They actually
introduced it to me during the
recruitment process. So the first
phone call I had with the recruiter,
he went over the benefits Paylocity
offered and Pluralsight was one of
them. I thought, ‘that sounds pretty
awesome.’ It just made the decision to
switch that much easier.”
Potential employees don’t think of
Pluralsight as an inexpensive benefit
or a tool most of them can afford on
their own. Rather, they see the massive
library of training and immediately
understand that learning these skills
from books and in-person training
would cost thousands of dollars.
Pluralsight’s library of more than
4,700 courses provides an opportunity
for personal and career growth that
employees truly value.
“Having access to Pluralsight actually
wasn’t on my radar when I was looking
for a job, but when Paylocity offered
it, I thought it was amazing,” says
Software Engineer Sharde Antonio.
“There aren’t a lot of companies that
really invest in the education of their
employees, so it was a big reason why
they stood out to me. It just shows that
they really care when they’re investing
the time and money to get me the
tools and education I need to learn
new technology.”
Pluralsight gets employees up to
speed quickly.
Access to Pluralsight is a bit like
having an expert technology trainer
on staff. No matter what programming
language or platform you need to
understand better, there are in-depth
courses on it. As a company develops
new software in emerging technologies,
employees use Pluralsight to learn new
skills and build cutting-edge products.
Pluralsight | Paylocity
Paylocity recently launched a new
development effort that required the
engineering team to use Angular.
“We just started using Angular on a
project this year and I had no idea,”
says Antonio. “I didn’t know anything
about it, so I watched a whole bunch
of videos on Pluralsight and they were
super helpful. It’s a really good tool.
The variety of training that they have—
almost anything that I’ve ever had a
question about or wanted to learn, I
just type it in to the search and up
pops a bunch of videos with answers.”
Dave Schmalz, Developer Lead on
the Web Benefits Team offered
another example.
“We had some pretty big concerns
about security around ASP.NET and
web API,” says Schmalz. “We did some
research using Pluralsight. There were
a couple courses on that and a security
model around it. It helped us develop
the security model that we’re using
today in some of our products.”
Employees turn to Pluralsight to both
learn new technologies and sharpen
their existing skills.
“I leaned on Pluralsight a lot to help me
through understanding JavaScript and
jQuery, to really up my game and make
sure that I was delivering the quality
that was needed for the role that I had,”
says Product Team Lead Brett McCarty.
“It helped propel me to become a more
senior developer.”
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Bite-size training makes it easy to learn new
skills as needed.
One of the biggest challenges for organizations
with training needs is finding the time for
already busy employees to learn. But because
Pluralsight’s training is set up in short segments, it
can be consumed whenever an employee needs
it, even during short breaks. Dan Hassenplug,
Paylocity’s Director of User Experience says,
“Much of the training is shorter, so knowing that
you can get a bite-sized chunk done and there’s
value at the end of it, even though it’s only 30
minutes long, is a good thing.”
But that isn’t always the best way to get up to
speed with a new skill. In other cases, access to
Pluralsight allows the Paylocity team to
schedule a day of training—just like
an in-house seminar.
Hassenplug shares an example: “My team
needed to transition to Git, but they’re not full-
stack developers, they’re typically from a design
background. As we started getting into Git, they
were intimidated by it. So I told them, why don’t
you guys take two days, we’ll order in pizza, and
you spend the time going through Pluralsight’s
training on Git. After that, they felt so much more
comfortable tackling that. Three months later we’re
fully operating on Git.”
Always-available training makes employees
“promotable.”
In today’s competitive environment, growing
companies often find it difficult to attract the skilled
talent they need for more experienced positions.
Paylocity’s learning culture helps solve that problem
by enabling employees to move into better career
opportunities. The technical recruiting team reports
that Pluralsight not only attracts new employees,
but it helps retain those same employees as they
grow out of lower-level jobs.
Pluralsight | Paylocity
“We’re showing genuine interest in furthering
their careers and helping them out with more
than just moving from one position to another,”
Rizvi says. “There’ve been a lot of folks [using
Pluralsight] that have realized their goals
and objectives fairly quickly. They’re already
moving into other positions, leading teams and
getting into management. We are very willing
to provide folks with all the tools they require,
not only to get the job done, but also to realize
their dreams from a career standpoint.”
What about the risk that they’ll take these
newly acquired skills to another employer?
That’s not really a consideration, according to
Durfee. Even if improving skills
makes employees more attractive to other
employers, she says, “We’d rather have people
at Paylocity learning and growing and moving
up within the organization than have them
standing still.”
Ready to empower your team with any-time
access to the best skills training? Contact us:
+1 888-368-1240 | +1 801-784-9007
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