Hill Dickinson LLP strengthens its people management capabilities with help of SelectHR

International law firm Hill Dickinson LLP has evolved from a series of mergers, having grown considerably and now employs over 1,400 people with over 170 partners. The firm’s SelectHR system from Access is helping Hill Dickinson make human resources a cornerstone of its business philosophy, supporting its employee lifecycle management needs.

Hill Dickinson is a leading full-service commercial law firm. Its current HR set up – 20 people in total – includes a learning and development team, a recruitment team and a generalist HR team.

“SelectHR has certainly improved the HR department’s ability to help the business in terms of providing information, accurate reporting and current data about appraisals completed and managers requesting holiday,” said Jane Walker, HR systems and benefits analyst for Hill Dickinson.

With SelectHR, the major impact has been the software’s ability to automate the firm’s business processes. Hill Dickinson created workflows with automatic emails as reminders instead of storing information in multiple spreadsheets.

“SelectHR tidies up the way we process things. It removed the human error of missing things, and eliminated the need to keep checking a spreadsheet,” said Jane.

Before SelectHR, the firm’s HR department invested a lot of admin time managing its appraisals. “The paperwork for 1,400 staff had to be returned to HR so we could collate it. This was a very admin-heavy job.” says Jane. “Now the work is done online, so it’s much easier to manage, and staff can refer back to their appraisals to see what their objectives are.”

Another area the firm expects to see improvement is its absence management. Access recently customised a workflow for Hill Dickinson to automatically capture all absences, returns to work and absence review meetings. Jane concluded, “This will take a massive burden off the person who currently processes this information.”