Zenni Optical, which designs and delivers high-quality and affordable eyewear to customers worldwide, is always on the lookout for ways to work smarter. But onboarding inefficiencies demanded too much of its HR team’s time. 

“When I joined Zenni, my responsibilities involved a lot of manual work,” said People Operations Coordinator Eric Ramos, who sent emails to every new hire with important information about first day logistics, points of contact, and to-do checklist items before starting work. “We had a template, but we still had to create the email, copy the template over, and type in missing pieces like the employee’s name and assigned HR business partner,” Eric said.

Eric also sent repetitive emails to the IT department to set up work devices and app permissions for every new hire. He lost even more time manually setting up different background checks for employees living in different countries. 

Anna Leal, Zenni’s HRIS Administrator, decided it was time to rethink onboarding. “Let’s make our processes better,” she said. “How can we automate some of this?”

Zenni used Rippling workflows to offload tedious administrative work, spare errors, and enhance the onboarding experience for new hires. “Rippling helped us think differently,” Anna said. 

Rippling helped us think differently.

Anna Leal

HRIS Administrator at Zenni Optical

Zenni added 10 Ripping automations to its onboarding process which saves Eric an hour a day in manual data entry. Instead of typing out welcome emails from scratch for every new hire, Rippling automatically generates text that Eric can quickly configure to match the incoming employee’s needs. Then Rippling auto-sends the email ahead of the employee’s first day. And when employees accept an offer, Rippling now automatically sends Zenni’s IT team messages to set up devices and app logins—instead of Eric typing emails out one-by-one. 

Eric no longer has to manually assign background checks tailored to different global employees living in different countries anymore. Thanks to Rippling’s integration with Checkr, he can automatically send the right screenings to international hires as soon as they sign an offer letter. He also automatically sends a prompt to new employees asking six get-to-know-you questions that he turns into a new hire welcome poster to share with the company. 

“We automated most of the email communications Eric sent,” Anna said. “Now, he can save a lot of time and focus more on strategy than busywork.”

Rippling also empowered Zenni’s HR Business Partners to make their own HRIS updates to account for employee lifecycle changes—like promotions, department moves, and pay bumps. 

Before, Eric and Anna managed a Slack channel with all of Zenni’s HR Business Partners, who pinged Eric whenever they needed to update information for one of the employees they managed. Pending Anna’s sign-off, Eric then had to make these changes, which led to delays and mistakes, since Eric was sometimes missing information. 

Now, Rippling is set up so that Eric doesn’t need to intervene at all. As soon as Anna approves changes, the HR Business Partners can make the updates themselves. “It’s a lot faster. We’re not involving a middleman,” Anna said.

Anna also appreciates how she can set up automated reminders with Rippling to help Zenni’s administrators handle important tasks on time. For instance, the system automatically reminds IT to set up new employees’ devices, and automatically nudges accounting to update records when employees change departments. 

“Those notifications are helpful,” Anna said. “Without them, there would be more manual emails or reports to send.“ In a prior role, she tried to set up something similar with ADP Workforce Now, but had to set up special access permissions for every notification recipient. “Whereas now, I don’t need to do that,” she said. “I can just include a general IT email address on those new hire notifications and they go out.”

Anna and Eric are both impressed with Rippling, which has a handy workflow to address seemingly every inefficiency they find. “Everything that we’ve been trying to do has worked for us,” Eric said. “It’s pretty cool to look at all of the upgrades we’ve made with the help of Rippling in the past year.”

• Time saved: With 10 new automations, Rippling cut Zenni’s onboarding time by five hours a week and eliminated an hour a week of manual HRIS updates.
• Errors averted: The new Rippling workflows also reduced typos and other manual mistakes.
• Improved onboarding: Zenni can provide an organized, professional, and supportive onboarding experience for every new hire. Hiring managers rave about the sleek new welcome emails.