Rhino is tackling the housing affordability crisis. With a mission to bring greater financial freedom to renters everywhere, Rhino offers insurance and cash security deposit products that simplify the security deposit process, making it more affordable for renters while providing safety and security to property owners.

After shifting to remote operations in 2020, Rhino dramatically increased hiring. At the start of 2020, Rhino had a team of 40 people. By the end of 2020, they hit 90—and in 2021, they reached 230 employees at their height of hiring.  

With so many new people coming onboard, Rhino needed a way to streamline pre-onboarding and onboarding operations.

Claire Babbage, Rhino’s Senior Director of People Operations, shares how Pyn helped the company through a period of rapid growth (and continued to be an asset once that growth slowed in 2022).

Challenge: Inefficient pre-onboarding and onboarding monopolizing the People Team’s time and energy

During the peak of Rhino’s hiring in 2021, five to ten new hires were manually onboarded each week. Claire and her team were spending hours emailing new hires, collecting employee information (like contact details and equipment preferences), and sending out onboarding materials.

Claire recognized that all that back-and-forth was not only tedious, it was monopolizing the People Team’s time and energy. They wanted to spend that time on more interactive parts of the onboarding process, and making sure their new employees were set up for success.

While Rhino’s HRIS offered some pre-onboarding and onboarding features, the platform didn’t have the automation functionality the team needed—and that’s when they found Pyn.

Solution: Using Pyn to streamline and automate communications

Claire and Rhino’s people team originally used Pyn to automate their pre-onboarding and onboarding communications, which was a critical support during their period of high growth.

“Automating our communications with Pyn cut out so much time for our onboarding team, which was a game changer,” says Claire.

Once Rhino’s hiring slowed in 2022, Claire explored other ways Pyn could help improve, streamline, and automate employee communications across the organization. She quickly saw how Pyn’s content library could benefit their communications strategy.

“I love the library content, it’s very useful,” says Claire.

Holiday messaging

Claire and the People Team recognize the importance of highlighting holidays and other special occasions. But as a small team, manually tracking when these communications needed to go out, and to whom, was time consuming. 

With Pyn, Claire has been able to automate the process by creating and scheduling their messaging ahead of time—to get the right messages, to the right people, at the right time. 

As Claire puts it, the team has been able to, “set it and forget it,” checking holiday messaging off their to-do list all at once. 

Content planning and creation

Claire knows that the effectiveness of internal communications comes down to planning and execution—and Pyn has proved an asset for both.

From a planning perspective, Claire values the organization of Pyn’s library content. She and the people team have used Pyn’s content sequencing as a blueprint for planning their own content, taking cues on what communications to send, when to send them, and in what order.

“Why reinvent the wheel if it's already there?,” says Claire. 

Now, instead of having to generate content from scratch (which, for many, can cause writer’s block), Pyn’s library gives Claire and her team examples and templates to start with, so they can get the ball rolling on content creation.

“Half the time you know what you want to say, but it's hard to get started,” says Claire. “The library content is a nice jumping off point,” says Claire. 

Sensitive communications

Between the continuing challenges of COVID, persistent political and social issues, and widespread layoffs, the past few years have been challenging. For many HR teams, knowing what to say in response to these events can be tough.

But Claire and her team have found Pyn to be a helpful ally when navigating challenging or sensitive communications. 

“Sometimes we think, ‘Is it our place to comment on this?,’” reflects Claire. “Then you see a resource come through from Pyn and it’s a reminder that everyone else is thinking about this.” 

Having suggestions about what to say in response to challenging circumstances (for example, the overturn of Roe vs. Wade) has helped Claire and her team better navigate those communications—and the reminder that they’re not alone in facing those challenges has been a reassurance.

Results

Integrating Pyn into their communication strategy has had a major impact on Claire and her team. 

“The library contains well-researched, well-written information that is very relevant to our workforce. It has been a huge help,” says Claire.

She’s also been impressed with Pyn’s support and collaborative approach to working with their clients; when Claire had ideas about what features could make Rhino’s experience with the platform even better, Pyn didn’t just listen to those ideas—they implemented them.

“We've been using Pyn for two years or so—and every piece of feedback we've ever had has now been developed,” says Claire.

Future plans

So, what’s next? Now that Rhino has experienced how Pyn can streamline pre-onboarding, onboarding, and other communications (like holidays), Claire and her team are actively working towards integrating Pyn into other processes, with plans to:

• Create performance management campaigns to allow managers to more easily navigate the review process
• Create goal-setting templates to help employees set and reach their goals
• Create communications to support and reassure employees in the current economic hiring climate