For the past few months we’ve been working hard to improve CiviHR’s user experience and interface and thought it was about time we pulled back the curtain to show you some of these improvements.
Recording details of staff contracts and then keeping them updated for any changes to job titles, pay, hours, and other job history essentials is vital not only for legal reasons but also for the proper functioning of your organisation.
Our goal has always been for CiviHR to be both affordable in price and comprehensive in features. In pursuit of the latter, our attention is now turning to the planning of the Recruitment module.
We know recruitment is a time consuming, but essential part of the HR process. We want to design set of features that will make an HR manager’s life easier by automating such things as emailing candidates, scheduling interviews, and collaborating internally on the hiring process.
We would love to find out from you what you would need an applicant tracking system to do.
On the 8th of September, we will be hosting a special evening at the Google Campus London in celebration of CiviHR’s official launch!
From 6:00pm to 9:00pm, we will share with your our journey creating CiviHR and open the floor for ideas, discussion, and for you to become a part of our future.
We are also planning some exclusive treats to make sure you have a great time. Grab yourself a candy floss, take home a polaroid from our photo booth, and automatically enter our exclusive competition just by being there.
In September, we will be releasing a new version of reports that will completely change the way you see and understand analytics. And we can’t wait to show it to you!
We met with a number of UK charities to discover what kind of reports would make a difference in their work life. And we found a long wishlist, with time, resources, and tools being the main barriers in creating powerful reports.
HR managers were endlessly exporting their data into spreadsheets and spending hours creating the same reports over and over.
Many of you will have heard we are working on a project called CiviHR. This a project to make a great open source HR system for non-profits.
With seed funding from the Zing foundation, CiviHR is a fully featured HR system, based on a core of CiviCRM and Drupal, that will be freely available for non-profit organisations.
We are excited to announce the release of CiviHR 1.4 stable - a version that is all about increased usefulness of existing modules based on feedback from our valued nonprofit partners. A very special thank you to Katherine Causton from UK Youth, Jane Doughty from Farm Africa, Aparna Patil and Archana Bagra from SNEHA, and Bhavini Goswami and Amit Shah from AKRSPI for some great suggestions!
We are excited to announce the release of CiviHR 1.4 beta - a version that is all about increased usefulness of existing modules based on feedback from our valued nonprofit partners. A very special thank you to Katherine Causton from UK Youth, Jane Doughty from Farm Africa, Aparna Patil and Archana Bagra from SNEHA, and Bhavini Goswami and Amit Shah from AKRSPI for some great suggestions!
We have been having a very enjoyable, and very productive time at the Tahoe sprints. Amongst other achievements, we have agreed the specification of those issues to be included in version 1.4 of CiviHR, scheduled for release in time for CiviCon London in September. This release will focus on improvements to the existing features, following the feedback we have received from our users.
We're excited to share that CiviHR 1.2 stable is ready for release. If you are new to CiviHR 1.2, you can read about its beta version here.
CiviHR 1.2 will save manhours and paperwork in non-profits in several new ways:
Involving, and listening closely to feedback from the end user has been one of the key strategies for the development of CiviHR since before its first release. We are delighted to share that SNEHA (Society for Nutrition, Education and Health Action) has joined our end-user team on March 4th, 2014.
CiviHR 1.2 Beta was released yesterday, most of the team is already working on the Recruitment module (see Tim's blog with mockups), while the rest of us are now putting together business requirements for the next major module - Training. This is an exciting time in the CiviHR project!
The Beta version of CiviHR 1.2 has now been released. This version adds an Absences module to CiviHR, allowing the recording and management of Vacations, Sickness, Maternity, Paternity, TOIL, and Other Absences.
Staff and volunteers can view their past and present absence requests, and request approval for future ones. The administrator can define absence periods, public holidays and new types of absence.
(This post is a follow-up to previous discussions about developing recruitment functionality for CiviHR. More information can be found in the first, second, and third blog posts well as the requirements wiki.)
A Quick Update
I find it delightful that my first blog post in the new year is to share with you the near completion of business requirements for CiviHR Recruitment. For the story so far, please catch up here.
Since the Previous Blog
Progress Made Since Previous Blog
In my previous blog on CiviHR Recruitment, I had shared our approach to develop the business requirements for this module. We created the first version and shared it on our wiki page for feedback from the Civi Community. We also reached out to several reputed nonprofits to get some feedback straight from the horse's mouth - the HR professional who is the intended end user of CiviHR.
The Purpose of CiviHR Recruitment
To me, the effort put in to build any system is worthwhile when it allows organizations to deliver better experiences all around. The CiviHR Recruitment function aims to deliver just that by:
Version 1.0 of CiviHR has now been released, and is available for download at http://civicrm.org/extensions/civihr or alternatively Compucorp are already offering a hosted version for organisations that do not want to install and maintain CiviHR themselves.
The features in this first release include:
* Staff Directory
* Work and Home Contact details
* Job Positions / Job Roles
* Emergency Contacts
* Bank details
* Identification
* Immigration / Work permits
Ahead of its first release, scheduled for Civicon London 2013, Farm Africa has committed to be the development partner for CiviHR.
Farm Africa - www.farmafrica.org - provides the tools and expertise to enable smallholders in eastern Africa to increase their harvests. Local staff train them to be more commercial, adding value to surpluses by milling, drying, or turning their produce into products that fetch a higher price. With better food for their families and reliable incomes from their businesses, farmers can build for the future.
Zing is planning the development of a CiviHR module.
