How Prisma Use HiPeople to Support Managers and Improve Onboarding

May 10, 2021
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James Young
How Prisma Use HiPeople to Support Managers and Improve Onboarding

Welcome to part one of our three-part Success Series with Prisma. 🎉

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be examining how Martin and the Prisma team are using HiPeople to achieve their strategic goals.

Keep your eyes peeled for:
- How Prisma use HiPeople to improve oversight and reduce hiring bias
- How Prisma use HiPeople to make informed and efficient hiring decisions


At a glance

- Company: Prisma (www.prisma.io)
- Size: 45 people (as of May 2021)
- Industry: Tech
- ATS: Greenhouse
- Hiring goals: 15-25 key hires this year. Scale from Series A to Series B

What are Martin & Prisma’s strategic goals?

Prisma is a next-generation ORM (Object Relational Map) that helps developers manage databases when building applications. In layman's terms, they’re a developer tools company. Prisma helps engineers build applications faster and with fewer errors, while having a great time doing it.

“We’re a Series A company, looking to successfully get to Series B. That’s my priority,” says Martin van Rensburg, Prisma’s Head of People & Operations. “That means we need our hiring processes to be in place, so we can immediately accelerate.”


“HiPeople delivers real value quickly, and that’s what makes it useful.”


“I don’t like introducing processes that don’t add a lot of value. And when you’re hiring, it’s easy to talk yourself out of any process in the interest of speed.

“You tell a Talent Acquisition person, ‘I want to do a reference check’ and the first thing they’ll say to you is, ‘How long is that going to take?’ They really don’t want to be slowed down.

“But HiPeople delivers real value quickly, and that’s what makes it useful.”

This is part one of Martin and Prisma’s story so far.

How Prisma improve manager capabilities and candidate onboarding with HiPeople

I need to develop manager capability inside the organisation. In the early phase of a startup, there’s a relatively flat hierarchy, with very few actual managers. That eventually reaches breaking point, and you need to develop managers and build management capacity.


“[HiPeople] gives managers the reinforcement they need to be proactive.”


Sometimes that’s bringing managers in from the outside, and sometimes that’s developing management talent internally. But what’s important is that you start building structures and mechanisms to make managers successful.

I care a lot about helping managers think clearly about coaching and onboarding people as individuals. HiPeople provides those insights and that understanding.

It allows us not to think of each new joiner as a role being filled, but an actual person who we can tailor our support to. It gives a very nice head-start on knowing how to manage a person — knowing how to develop them, knowing how to think about their performance, and knowing what makes them tick.

Right now we’re building out our onboarding competence, and HiPeople’s candidate insights allow us to sit with the hiring manager and build an effective onboarding plan. This is a game-changer for younger managers, and it also takes a lot of the administrative burden off of our team.


“[HiPeople] gives us a scientific foundation to make smarter onboarding decisions.”

‍There is a real enthusiasm about HiPeople at Prisma. Our managers can rely on an objective resource to say, “This underpins my decision to do XYZ to support my new hire.”

It gives managers, who might not have experience making these kinds of decisions (it takes a long time to build enough confidence to make decisions about people), the reinforcement they need to be proactive managers.

And it gives us, as an HR team, a scientific foundation to make smarter onboarding decisions.

Find out more…

We’ll be posting parts two and three of this series very soon. Follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook, and we’ll notify you when they’re available.

And if you’d like to learn more about HiPeople — and how we can help you hit your strategic hiring goals — you can schedule a free demo with a member of our team. 🥳