About...
Numan is a digital healthcare provider focused on men’s and women’s health, preventative health, and obesity management. They’re a CQC-regulated company with a mission to make healthcare accessible and convenient.
per employee
not weeks
Numan
Background check experience
What’s the solution to a fast-growing startup with a lot of regulatory responsibilities?
Automation, obviously.
With 300 employees spread out over two business entities, the small but mighty People Team at Numan needed to keep up, and fast. And after onboarding 235 new employees in the last 12 months, keeping their paperwork in order is a top priority.
“Compliance with the CQC is really important for us," said Sophie West, People Operations Manager. "Working in a regulated industry, we want to make sure that we're following all guidelines properly to protect our patients and our team."
Sophie’s role is to make the employee lifecycle seamless — and that includes background checks required by the CQC. She collaborates with internal teams such as Governance and IT to develop automated onboarding processes, particularly in relation to pre-employment checks. This helps to ensure compliance and that the team isn’t spending too much time on manual processes.
She’s also responsible for running “fit and proper” checks on their board of directors, collaborating closely with Numan’s governance team to understand what’s required. With such senior stakeholders directly involved, they need tools that make it easier and faster to get key checks done.
At Numan, automation is a big focus. So cutting the manual work that typically comes with background checking was a must-have for the team.
After implementing Zinc at her previous company, Sophie knew that was a must-have for her new role at Numan. Thankfully, it was already up and running when she joined the team.
Zinc helped Numan prioritise automation and take away manual processes from their workflow. They knew they could trust the platform to:
- Help them stay compliant whether they were running checks on new joiners or existing employees
- Automate checks and help them claim back time for high-impact projects
- Integrate seamlessly with HiBob and Lever
Plus, Zinc’s team was alongside them the entire time to advise on compliance, or tackle any issues.
Results
Because Zinc was running smoothly when Sophie joined, she could jump straight into her role: finding places to smooth out the employee journey and drive efficiency.
Rechecks and compliance
The first step was making sure that their rechecks and compliance were as slick as possible. The ability to store data like referee and references in Zinc and use them for rechecks was key, especially when it came to speeding up the process for senior stakeholders.
Even when they did 300 rechecks in one month, results came back with a 16-day average turnaround time.
Instead of waiting for all the other checks to complete before starting on the next one, Zinc’s automated system runs them all at the same time — drastically cutting down on turnaround times.
But it wasn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. DBS checks were mandatory for all their employees due to CQC regulations, but Zinc allows them to create and send different packages depending on the level of checks that the employee needed. With specific packages for pharmacists, employees with face-to-face patients, and other staff, checks are always tailored to the role and can be sent in just a few clicks.
Automation-first philosophy
“We try to make the employee experience seamless at Numan, so everything is integrated and automated,” said Sophie. “We don’t have a lot of manual touchpoints with employees.”
Zinc automatically follows up on references, saving the team from spending hours chasing referees. And thanks to Zinc’s rechecking feature, they don’t have to manually upload every employee’s details again — it’s all done through one bulk upload and a few clicks.
“Because we work in tech, our processes have to reflect the way the company works. We want our patients to go through a smooth onboarding, and the employee experience should mirror that,” said Sophie.
Zinc has helped the People Team stay intentionally small as Numan scales. The focus on automation has helped the Numan team to push self-service tools and give employees the ability to find answers for themselves. With the time saved, they’ve been able to focus on more strategic initiatives, like implementing Notion to consolidate their tech stack. Their next focus? Building career frameworks and delivering employee levelling.
Seamless integrations
As part of their automation first philosophy, Zinc had to integrate well with their existing HR tech stack.
Today, the team can trigger checks directly through their ATS, Lever. A custom workflow automatically triggers a webhook and Zinc sends out emails to candidates — no manual data uploads required. All the recruiters need to do is add a tag in their ATS that indicates what check package the employee needs, and the checks run automatically.
In HiBob, they continue to move candidates through workflows that go to IT, office management, and other teams involved in the onboarding process. Reports are automatically saved in the HiBob document file, so they never have to be worried about human error and forgetfulness.
“If you’re looking to automate your processes, Zinc fits really nicely into an HR tech stack,” said Sophie. “It makes it an easy and seamless candidate experience.”
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