MHR is a global provider of innovative HCM (Human Capital Management) solutions covering all aspects of human resources management.

The key to business growth rests around the ability for a company to attract, develop and retain the talent that will separate it from its competition. Employee experience is key to increasing engagement with HR – MHR accomplishes this through its innovative HCM platform – it focuses on putting the employees at the heart of every HR decision to help businesses acquire and manage talent while reducing turnover.

The Challenge

HR software providers are looking for ways to differentiate their product in a fiercely competitive marketplace.

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MHR quickly identified that adding calendar sync to their products was the solution to make HR solutions less intrusive in the day-to-day operations of businesses.

They recognized that the future of HR tech is fitting in and around peoples’ lives, on the devices and services they use every day. When someone wants to book holidays, why make them login to an external application rather than allowing them to manage all their schedule commitments from where it makes sense? Why not enable all scheduling tasks to be managed directly via calendars? Calendars are popular interfaces that most employees are familiar with.

Anton Roe, CTO of MHR explains why this is so important:

Despite the appeal of calendar sync – from appraisal bookings to absences and interview scheduling – the technical complexity involved kept it from being developed as a feature.

There are several main calendar services, and each is built differently. These require separate integrations and ongoing maintenance to stay connected with People First, which can be a drain on valuable development resources.

The Solution

The team at MHR reached out to Cronofy to assess if our Calendar API could be the way to solve their calendar sync challenges and build smart scheduling features.

Our integration consultants regularly meet with MHR’s engineering teams to resolve any roadblock and discuss how MHR can align their roadmap with Cronofy’s upcoming features. This has allowed developers and product managers at MHR are to focus on embedding real-time calendar sync through the Cronofy API into their new HR platform.

For their clients, booking meetings, yearly appraisals, and training sessions can represent a big strain on their resources. It involves aligning the schedules of numerous people both inside and outside of the organization. It also means knowing which meeting rooms and parking spaces are free or busy.

By integrating the Cronofy Calendar API in their software MHR now allow their users to access other calendars’ real-time availability. For example, when setting up an interview the system knows who is free and busy and which meeting rooms can be used.

It is now possible to schedule one-to-one meetings between managers and team members automatically. If the meetings need to be rescheduled attendees can be notified.

This gives the product team at MHR all the flexibility they need to bring value-adding features to their users. And because Cronofy takes care of establishing and maintaining connections with all the calendar services, no user gets left behind and maintenance costs are kept to a minimum.

But what really sold the feasibility of adding calendar sync to People First is that each user’s calendar doesn’t need to be authorized individually. That simply wouldn’t be effective for their clients, some of whom have tens of thousands of employees to onboard.

Our Enterprise Connect feature proved to be incredibly valuable to MHR. With Enterprise Connect, when MHR signs a new client they can authorize the calendars of that entire organization in one go. This helps prevent communication breakdown and means that users can start benefitting from calendar sync straight away!

Going Forward

Another important trend in today’s HR Tech environment is the rise of AI applications. MHR is at the forefront of that innovation and have recently introduced their first People First Chatbot which allows employees to discuss absences, ask questions or book meetings. There is a natural fit with the Cronofy Availability API and we’re excited to see what new applications of calendar sync will be possible using AI.

Add real-time Calendar Sync to your HR software

If you want to create new revenue streams for your HR software by adding great scheduling features all your users will benefit from then give the Cronofy Calendar API a go.

You can delve into the API directly and sign-up for a free Account to access your Developer Dashboard and start building straight away.

If you’d like more information on our use cases don’t hesitate to fill in your details in the form below and we will be in touch.