SEERA Takes its Talent to the World

27th October 2015, Microsoft

It was an idea 13 years in gestation and now Microsoft Azure is helping to take talent management software company SEERA to the world.

Founded and led by dynamic CEO Bradley Birchall, SEERA came into existence four years ago but first started as an idea in his head more than a decade earlier when he was heavily involved in the establishment of Seek, now Australia’s leading employment website but then just an ambitious start-up trying to take on the job advertising sector which had long been firmly entrenched in newspapers.

“I was responsible for building Seek’s platform and operations,” Mr Birchall said. “I saw a flaw in the market that I approached the Seek board on, and said look: ‘It’s all good to provide a job site, but what we’re not addressing is the management of people and the management of organisations and how they deal with those people’.

“So that’s going back 13 years ago now, and at the time it would have been difficult to achieve due to the inherent technology constraints.  I always knew that one day I would realise the dream when the time was right.”

When that time came, Mr Birchall established SEERA and started building the first version in Java using Amazon Web Services, but after a year decided to switch to .net and the Microsoft Azure platform.

“It was a completely different approach to all existing HR solutions. You can profile people at the recruitment point which provides enormous savings for customers. With their profile and performance appraisal information you can then do things like gap analysis, project resourcing, and learning and development planning.  And you can automate all of those processes that were previously manual or cumbersome,” he said.

“What differentiates SEERA is that it uses competency frameworks as the foundation.”

It’s been a winning differentiator, with the company in recent times doubling in size every three to four months.

Helping to fuel that expansion was a move to Microsoft Azure.

“After we started using Microsoft Azure we found that the cost of developing and building out SEERA and the ongoing management costs using Azure were, on average, 30 to 40 per cent lower than AWS.  In addition, Azure allowed us to innovate on top of the platform to deliver value to our every growing customer base by adding new features and functionality on a regular cadence.”

SEERA has products for businesses at all stages of growth, from SMBs to enterprises, and the rapid growth is “because we’re providing features and functionality that just simply don’t exist in traditional HR solutions,” Mr Birchall said.

For the Australian Technical and Management College (ATMC), an educational institute with four campuses in Victoria, and ones in Sydney, Sri Lanka and Malaysia, SEERA has proved a godsend.

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