Mindful Chef Staff

Mindful Chef

The right ingredients for HR excellence

Industry: Food & Beverage

About the company: On a mission to make eating healthy since 2015, Mindful Chef creates delicious recipe boxes that help change the way the world eats. As a company, they are B-Corp certified and driven by the principles of ​​being mindful, personable, and unafraid.

Sarah Thomas, Mindful Chef

Sarah Thomas
People Lead

mindful chef logo

The Problem: Skimping On Strategy

When Sarah joined Mindful Chef, there really hadn’t been an appetite yet for a proper people strategy. She started by changing that, but what she really needed was a tool that could help them continue to focus on their people every day.

Here’s how HR looked at the time: “Before Personio, we were working on many different spreadsheets, many different reports, trying to do manual reports, and trying to do manual contracts and editing that way.”

Before, we were working on many different spreadsheets…

They knew growth was on the horizon, so what Mindful Chef really needed was a system that could grow with them, could help standardise their recruitment and onboarding processes and could afford them the time to focus on strategic topics that would add value to the business.

Too much data spread across too many tools

A system that worked but couldn’t optimise their work

The need for a solution that could match their own growth

current employees

percent recyclable and sustainable

million meals donated

Through Personio, we have been able to build up our in-house recruiting team.

Making the Choice

As mentioned, Sarah and the team at Mindful Chef needed a system that would grow with them and ensure security and ease of use along the way. And, they did their research along the way. After researching and learning more about numerous providers, Sarah decided on what would be the ideal solution: Personio.

In Sarah’s own words: “A lot of other HR tools are really great at engagement and performance, but don’t have a recruitment function. Or, they are really good at payroll but they don’t have anything to do with performance. Personio offered a good balance of everything we needed.”

Not only was there balance, but an ability to automate: “Personio offered a great level of automation and personalisation which meant that we could design workflows that suited our unique processes. That was really important to us,” Sarah explains.

Mindful Chef Office

The Implementation Process

Now that the decision had been made, it was time to implement Personio. Sarah noted the induction process, along with their Account Manager, helped make the process so much easier — they would even have weekly meetings to ask questions and provide updates.

We would focus on recruitment, and then onboarding, and then absences and policies. It was really thorough and really detailed.

Then, the rollout process for the entire company began. In Sarah’s experience, she hosted drop-in sessions where employees could ask questions about using Personio, and generally learn how to use it for their own unique needs. And, thanks to resources like Personio’s Help Center, Sarah always had the answers she needed whenever she wanted to make a change or had questions about optimisations.

Enjoying the Results

One of the key criteria of success, for just about any HR software, is how often your team uses it and relies on it. For Sarah and her team: “We wake up in the morning and go on Personio.” Since implementing Personio, the team at Mindful Chef has been able to automate many of their processes, while using Personio to add a personal touch to their operations.

“Vacations, birthdays, anniversaries, probationary periods…Personio is a lifesaver in giving that automation for us and to send out messages to maintain that personal touch.” And, because they are recruiting and growing at such a great pace, Personio’s Recruitment feature has also proven to be immensely valuable for the team. Sarah breaks it down, “Through Personio, we have been able to build up our in-house recruiting team and have a really efficient but candidate-focused recruitment process, which was important to both me and the business.”

Finally, Personio has also opened up time for the team to focus on more important things: “I wouldn’t be able to do any of the more added-value things, as a business partner, without the automation that Personio provides.” It’s in all these ways that Personio has helped Mindful Chef take their HR work to the next level: “We have created workflows that really work for us, but Personio allows us to make it happen.”

A proper ATS that takes candidates from recruitment to onboarding

Document templates that save time, confusion, and stress

All the basic admin covered to make room for more strategic initiatives

What do you appreciate most about Personio?

Sarah’s diligence in picking a new HR solution meant she knew what she needed from her new system. And, for her, “if you’re scaling and growing, Personio solves so many issues for you. I spent time looking at all the options and Personio met so many of our needs.”

But, what she appreciates most is a commitment to growth. As she explains, “One of the greatest things about Personio is the constant improvements… I invested in it twelve months ago, but we are getting new tools and functionalities almost every day.” For her, that’s the key: “Personio is not one static product, it’s evolving and becoming even better every day.”

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