Leaner People Teams with Analytics

“Knoetic empowers People and department leads to crave and seamlessly pull the data and insights they need to improve engagement on their teams in a matter of minutes—and without increasing the workload for our People Ops team.”

– Vivek Reddy, Head of HR Operations, Benchling

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Meet Benchling

Benchling powers the world’s most innovative biotechnology companies to develop breakthrough products and accelerate their time to market.

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As a pioneer of cloud-based research and development (R&D), the company has rapidly grown to 800+ employees and raised $400M+ since its founding in 2012. Today, 200k+ scientists at 7k+ research institutions and 600+ companies rely on Benchling’s software to power possibilities and accelerate the introduction of next-generation medicine, food, and materials.

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The Challenge

Considered one of the fastest growing cloud companies in the world, Benchling recruits hundreds of employees annually to support its mission of unlocking the power of biotechnology—and relies on a robust HR tech stack to do so.

• Reporting bottlenecks: Despite their growth, reporting requests from executives were centralized to their 2-person People Operations team, who spent multiple hours each week aggregating data from their HRIS, ATS, and Engagement solutions to understand gender, ethnicity, location, and department composition, leaving little time for strategy.
  
  
• Little insight into attrition: As one of the many companies befallen to the Great Resignation, Benchling didn’t have a clear understanding of what was driving company attrition and why. All of this made it difficult to level-set with leaders and devise strategies for where they needed to apply their focus to improve employee engagement and retention.
  
  
• Reactionary decision-making: Reporting bottlenecks led to growing backlogs, which resulted in a lack of real-time clarity on the progress of their People initiatives. This left Benchling’s People Operations team to function as a service center rather than a strategic business function. 

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A Solution with Knoetic‍

Having used Knoetic at a previous company, Benchling’s Head of HR Operations, Vivek Reddy, brought the platform with him to remain ahead of business needs. Today, Knoetic serves as Benchling’s single source of truth, revealing vital people insights across their HR tech stack—BambooHR, Greenhouse, and Lattice— to inform key business decisions on DEI, retention, and more.
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‍“Once department heads got a taste of these insights, they immediately wanted more. And that engagement—especially from business leaders—goes a long way in elevating the People Operations function.”

—Vivek Reddy, Head of HR Operations, Benchling

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The Outcome

With Knoetic, Benchling visualizes their people data more seamlessly than what they received out-of-the-box with their HRIS. Their Head of People, Meg Makalou, can now pull data herself in real-time to share during one-on-ones with other executives and in advance of board meetings.

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Democratizing access to people analytics

Today, Benchling’s CEO and Heads of People, Engineering, Field Operations, and Product & Design rely on Knoetic to gain insight into the composition of their growing workforce, reasons for attrition, and mobility trends, enabling business leaders to create quick action plans and transform their strategy.

Knoetic in Action:

DEI trends, for example, can now be segmented across age, gender or ethnicity and correlated with location or department to reveal insights into the representation of women on a company’s engineering team or at HQ.

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People intelligence reporting, delivered in minutes

Since reports could now be pulled in minutes (not hours), executives are able to quickly get the information they need before going into their next board meeting, DEI managers can tailor their programs quickly, and HRBPs can positively influence business functions directly.

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Outcomes rooted in data—not assumptions

Thanks to having more accurate insights about their workforce composition and trends, Benchling is now able to test and validate theories about their people regularly, giving leadership more confidence to push back on inaccurate assumptions and make data-driven people decisions.

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“Knoetic has allowed our Head of People to pull meaningful insights about Benchling’s employee population in real-time without the help of a dedicated ops or analytics team.”

—Vivek Reddy, Head of HR Operations, Benchling

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One Final Takeaway

Thanks to our partnership, Benchling runs a leaner People Operations team (even as headcount grows). Reporting that took hours now takes minutes. And the power to influence people is democratized into the hands of business leaders, giving everyone ownership in creating a better workplace.

Benchling’s People team now has more time to shape strategy (and spends less time operating as a fulfillment center). Vivek’s only remaining wish? To get Knoetic into the hands of more business leaders.

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‍“Knoetic allowed us to build a leaner People Ops team that produces more valuable insights for our C-suite and leaders about where we want to invest our resources.”

—Vivek Reddy, Head of HR Operations, Benchling‍

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