Darwin Box - Review
In a Nut Shell:
● Darwinbox is a cloud-based, end-to-end HRMS.
● It takes care of all HR needs across the employee life cycle—from recruitment,
onboarding, employee management, payroll, leave, transfer, and performance
management to exit management.
● It gives an employer a 360-degree view of an employee—performance trajectory, salary,
promotions—thus easing the decision-making process.
● Its pricing model follows the SaaS model (software as a service), so there will be no large
upfront costs/ licence fees, or the need to invest in costly IT infrastructure.
● The pricing is based on the subscription fee per employee per month.
● This pay-as-you-go pricing model gives the clients the flexibility to grow without having
to worry about licence restrictions and IT infrastructure limitations.
● A client can subscribe to the entire suite of HCM modules available or choose specific
modules as per their requirement. The solution can function modularly to serve only the
talent management or workforce management needs of an enterprise.
● Currently, 650,000+ employees across 200+ enterprise clients are using Darwin Box.
● Their marquee clients include Arvind, Dr Reddy’s, Paytm, Nivea, Myntra, GVK Bio,
Delhivery, Ekart, Swiggy, and more.
● Darwinbox has emerged as a thought leader in HR Tech space for their ideology of design
thinking and consumer centricity.
● Darwinbox is recognized as one of the most preferred HCM solutions in APAC (Gartner
2018)
Note: These points are excerpts about Darwinbox from their website and other online portals.
Features
Darwinbox provides the following comprehensive features set across the employee life cycle.
● Core HR Processes
○ Centralized & Flexible Employee Database
○ Org Charts
○ Custom Employee Profiles
○ Attendance Management (Biometric Integration, Location-based attendance)
○ Leave/Time-off tracking
○ Roles and Permissions
○ Company calendar for tracking key events
● Recruitment
○ Plan Your Hiring Process
○ Position Mapping
○ Company Branded Careers Page
○ Source Candidates from Multiple Channels
○ Boost Referrals
○ Manage Candidates and Prospects
○ Streamline Scheduling
○ Score Candidates through Custom Evaluations
○ Reports & Analytics
● Employee Movement
○ Onboarding
○ Employee movement checklists
○ Easy approval processes
○ Documentation and handoffs
○ Flexible Workflows for Employee movements
● Employee Payroll Management
○ Payroll & Taxation
○ Simple tax declarations
○ Easy expense claims and reimbursements
○ Benefits Management
○ Generate local and national statutory compliances
○ Detailed analytics and MIS reporting
○ Seamlessly integrate with other Darwinbox modules
○ Custom-built integrations with existing ERP platform
○ Flexible compensation structure (Benefits/Allowance Management)
● Performance/Talent Management
○ Multiple assessment frameworks for feedback and review cycles
○ Multi-stakeholder feedback ( 360 degrees etc)
○ Goal cascading
○ Ongoing progress tracking
○ Feedback through interim milestones
○ Performance journals
○ Compensation modelling
● Employee Engagement
○ Vibe! - Organisation social network for work, fun and frolic
○ Pulse - Real-time organisation feedback/pulse to gauge the organisation mood
● MIS & Analytics
○ Detailed pre-designed rosters/MIS
○ Visual Analytics
○ Reports customised at every level based on hierarchy
○ Predictive Analytics on hiring, turnover, compensation, potential etc
○ Decision-making insights
Main USPs of Darwinbox
● Intuitive user experience with well thought out digital interfaces
○ Enterprise tools lag far behind today’s consumer apps (for example, Uber,
Facebook) with respect to the quality of technology, usability, and scalability.
Darwinbox aims to bridge this new ‘digital divide’ and build products that are as
effective as your daily use products.
○ A lot of time and effort has to be spent on training and familiarizing new
workforce to use tools/platforms effectively. Even after that, there is no
guarantee for user adoption.
○ Darwinbox’s enterprise HRMS platform is built with a clear focus on
intuitiveness and scalability, with standards of best in class consumer apps to
ensure high levels of adoption and lower time to realize value from it.
○ Mobile-first features enabling agility.
● Flexible Modular Design
○ The application is configurable to the customer’s unique needs and seamlessly
integrable with the customer’s existing platforms.
● Integrated platform
○ Darwinbox takes care of all employee needs with one login ensuring seamless
information flow between multiple modules with no loss in data/errors due to
manual intervention.
● Open platform
○ Darwinbox is built in an open API framework, which allows it to easily integrate
with any system in the future which again will improve the experience of both the
employees and administrators alike.
● Intelligent
○ Analytical frameworks to not just report from available data but focus on decision-
making frameworks, which are data-driven. For example, succession planning,
interviewer effectiveness, attrition prediction, and promotion effectiveness.
● Faster time to value:
○ At Darwinbox, from the first point of contact to the last, it is one organisation and
ideology that touches the clients.
○ Insights gained during the sales process are carried forward to the implementation
stage by the same team to drive results five times faster than the alternatives
available in the market.
○ It also ensures that what is promised is ultimately delivered.
● Strong post-sales support
Points based on User Reviews on Gartner Peer Insights:
Positives:
● Ease of use for end-users (employees)
● Entire HR operations under one roof.
● The product is intuitive (higher usage and lesser learning time)
● The product can be integrated with third-party applications.
● The best part of the platform was audience adaptation. The application can be rolled out
with a minimal amount of training as the platform is intuitive.
● The design and the interface are highly modular and the best feature is the flexibility.
● This is a very dynamic platform on which features are being added or modified almost
every day.
● The customer support team is very supportive.
● A cost-effective solution to small to large organizations because of its competitive pricing
and simple user interface.
Negatives:
● Implementation can be little challenging while migrating existing data to the platform.
● Onboarding and Recruitment Module is something which needs a lot of improvement. Its
recruitment model is not that great as compared to the ACE players in the market but is a
sustainable one.
● The implementation process is vast and takes a lot of time.3 - 6 months (<6)
● Expense or pay-roll management functionality needs improvement
● The page load time increases after the number of hosted users increase.
● The application has very frequent downtimes.
● I lot of time will take in order to upload or update your existing data on this portal and
you have to do it manually.
● Sometimes there are certain bugs in the application which doesn't record the data
properly or simply skips recording it. It definitely needs some improvement in this regard
otherwise its awesome in every other aspect.
Inference
Darwinbox is an end-to-end HRMS taking care of all HR needs across the employee life cycle. It
is a cloud-based platform with a SaaS-based pricing model (software as a service). The pricing is
based on the subscription fee per employee per month. There is a provision to opt for specific
modules instead of the entire suite of HRMS. It is one of the top HRMS in India and the Asia
Pacific and getting recognized in other regions as well. Quite a number of start-ups and mid to
large firms are using Darwinbox’s HRMS solutions.
Their main standout point is intuitive UI/UX with a major focus on the end-user(employees). Their
Core HR Module is considered as best among all modules. As a whole, the HRMS suite is well
received by the current clients and it meets the needs of the client’s requirements. However,
Recruitment and Payroll management modules need improvement. Though the performance of the
application is considered good, some of the customers have raised issues of downtimes, slowness
as the number of users increases. Also, the initial migration of data from existing HRMS to
Darwinbox can be time-consuming and cumbersome.
Though there are few minor drawbacks, If we are looking for cost-effective, cloud-based, complete
HRMS suite, Darwinbox shall be a strong contender. Understanding the challenges of current
HRMS and how Darwinbox handles them, can give us more confidence in the platform.
