You’ve bought HiBob.Now someone has tobuild it properly.
Buying the system was the easy part. Getting your data clean, your permissions right and your managers actually using it is where implementations quietly go wrong.
Book a call →It falls apart in week three
The demo looked brilliant. Then the project lands on whoever has the most spare capacity, usually an ops manager who has never built an HRIS before. They’re handed a spreadsheet of ninety people with inconsistent job titles, three versions of the same start date, and no agreed levelling structure, and asked to make it all fit.
What that actually looks like →
What follows is predictable. Data goes in messy and stays messy. Permission groups get set loosely because it’s quicker, and six weeks later someone’s salary is visible to people who shouldn’t see it. Time off policies get built to one country’s rules when you employ people in four. Managers log in twice, find nothing useful, and go back to Slack.
Then the system gets blamed. It’s almost never the system.
What does a HiBob implementation consultant do?
A HiBob implementation consultant plans and delivers your move onto HiBob: cleansing and migrating your people data, designing the org structure and permission groups, configuring time off and lifecycle flows for each country you employ in, connecting payroll and other systems, and training managers so the platform gets used. Most UK implementations take six to ten weeks.
Decisions first, configuration second
We agree your org structure, job families and levels before anything is configured, because the org chart and permissions are downstream of decisions most companies haven’t made yet. Getting those right is what stops you rebuilding in nine months.
HiBob’s own onboarding team is good at HiBob. What they can’t do is tell you that your engineering levels don’t map to your commercial ones, or that your payroll cut-off makes a mid-month go-live a bad idea. That’s the gap I fill.
Illustrative. Getting this wrong is the single most common HiBob problem I get called about.
01Discovery and design
Current state, data sources, headcount by entity, what’s broken today. We agree what good looks like and what’s out of scope.
02Data cleanse and mapping
The unglamorous part that decides whether the whole thing works. Field mapping, deduplication, historical data, contracts and documents.
03Configuration
Core HR, org structure, permission groups, time off by jurisdiction, lifecycle flows, document templates, task lists.
04Integrations
Payroll, SSO, Google Workspace, Slack, your ATS. Tested properly rather than switched on and hoped for.
05Testing and sign-off
Sandbox runs with real scenarios: a new starter, a leaver, a promotion, a parental leave request, a manager trying to see something they shouldn’t.
06Launch and handover
Manager training, employee comms, two weeks bedding in, then documentation and a named owner.
Six to ten weeks, depending on your data
Multi-entity or messy legacy data pushes this out. I’ll tell you which one you are at discovery, not at week five.
The whole build
- Full HiBob build from discovery to go-live
- Data cleansing, mapping and migration from your system or spreadsheets
- Org structure, job families and levelling design
- Permission groups built to protect sensitive data properly
- Multi-country time off and absence policies
- Payroll, SSO and ATS integrations
- Manager training and employee launch comms
- Documentation, handover and post-launch support
What founders ask
How long does a HiBob implementation take?
Six to ten weeks for most scale-ups. A single-entity business under sixty people with clean data can be quicker. Multiple entities or a payroll integration adds time.
Why not just use HiBob’s own onboarding?
They know the product well. What they can’t do is make your business decisions: what your levels are, who should see salary data, how leave differs by country. That’s where projects stall.
Can you migrate us from BambooHR, Personio or Sage?
Yes, and from spreadsheets, which is more common than people admit. Cleanse first, map, test, then move.
We employ people in the UK, Ireland and the US. Can you handle that?
That’s the usual shape. Building one policy and applying it everywhere is the most common mistake I’m asked to fix.
What happens after go-live?
I stay involved for a couple of weeks while it beds in, then hand over with documentation.