Inflo provides audit technology that helps accounting firms deliver higher-quality audits with greater visibility, efficiency and confidence. As a business built around trusted data and better decision-making, Inflo holds its own internal systems to the same standard. So when the People team went looking for a new HR platform, they needed more than somewhere to store employee records. They needed a system that could help them become what Michelle MacIntyre, Lead People Business Partner at Inflo, calls “enablers” of the business.
That is when the Inflo and HiBob partnership began. What followed was a fast, self-led implementation that turned a fragmented HR tech stack into a single source of truth, a launch nobody could ignore, and a People team that has become the core function the business relies on.
HR data the business can trust
Before Bob, HR at Inflo ran on a HR tech stack that had never been built to talk to each other. Each system worked perfectly fine, but when it came to pulling something as simple as a performance snapshot, it meant exporting from one system, checking it against data exported from another, and reconciling the two by hand.
“We had disjointed systems,” Michelle says. “If you wanted to pull something together, you had to be in Excel with it, and it just wasted so much time.“
In the summer of 2024, Inflo rewrote its four core values adding ‘science,’ a commitment to data-led decision-making, alongside agility, openness, and ownership. That’s when Michelle knew the way her team (and the technology that enables it) supported the business and delivered HR needed to change.
Take, for instance, payroll. While Inflo works with an external accountancy firm to run payroll, before Bob, every cycle meant manually filling in an exceptions spreadsheet, sending it over, and hoping nothing had slipped through. But, operating as an enterprise organization, that kind of manual handoff was becoming a risk the business could no longer afford to carry.
So, when it came to upgrading their HR tech stack, Michelle already knew what she wanted: Bob. In fact, she had wanted Bob for years (even before starting at Inflo), having seen and heard about its functionality from colleagues using the platform elsewhere. And now was finally the opportunity to invest.
85% adoption within four days
Inflo’s first kickoff call with Bob was on 5 January 2026. And in under a swift eleven weeks, the full company-wide launch followed, covering Core HR, Hiring, and a first slice of Talent. But what is interesting about Inflo’s implementation is how they approached it.
To entice adoption, Michelle built a company-wide scavenger hunt through Bob, linked to a duck race that one of Inflo’s department heads had used to raise money for his London Marathon sponsorship. Complete the hunt by exploring the new platform, get entered into the race, with an Amazon voucher on the line for the winner of three races.
And what a success the launch was. 85% of the company had logged into Bob within four days. Even Inflo’s software engineers (not an easy crowd to win over with a new system) got in touch to tell Michelle it was “mint.”
“We ended up with 85% of staff logged in within the first four days. I just knew it would work with us.” says Michelle.
However, as Michelle put it: none of that would have been possible without the support behind it, pointing to HiBob’s implementation team as being just as responsible for the pace as anything Inflo did internally.
“The customer service, throughout, has been nothing but absolutely amazing. We get in contact with the team quite a lot, and it’s always so quick and easy,” confesses Michelle.
Making reports leadership ready
With the adoption rollout being a success, it was time for the Inflo People team to start getting the data that will drive leadership decisions and support the business’s trials and tribulations through data-informed decision-making.
And that started with performance management, through the Bob Talent Module.
Inflo’s previous performance tool had been rolled out company-wide, but the usage was minimal (around 25%). Only part of the business had ever really adopted it, largely because the platform was clunky and left no room to shape it around how Inflo worked. Bob, on the other hand, is different and flexible enough that the team could design the check-in themselves, exactly the way they wanted it.
So when the team built quarterly performance check-ins in Bob, they went the opposite way on purpose: one smiley-face-scale question for employees, and one for managers, simply asking how the quarter went. A further 20 questions are there if people want them, but nobody has to go past the first one to submit.
It’s a small design choice with a bigger effect than it looks. Completion rates have climbed, and Michelle now has a genuine, company-wide read on how people are feeling every quarter. This was something that used to be next to impossible to get a straight answer on across a business this size.
It’s a direct expression of “science,” the value Inflo built into its DNA, and for the first time, the People team had a tool that could deliver on it.
The value of that showed up almost immediately. Not long after quarterly check-ins launched, Michelle was asked directly for a company-wide performance profile. And instead of a week-old spreadsheet stitched together by hand, Michelle was able to hand leadership a clean, current dataset in minutes that gives an accurate representation of the organization’s mood.
Turning customization into capacity
It is Bob’s customizability that has really helped the Inflo team augment their processes, building something no off-the-shelf platform would have supported. Working with CoPilot and Bob’s AI assistant, which they’ve nicknamed “Why-Aye Bob,” a nod to the team’s UK North East roots, Michelle designed a People Leadership Tracker: a simple field where People Partners log a note against an employee, assign a risk rating, and flag it for visibility with the relevant head of department. Anything urgent goes straight to leadership immediately; everything else waits for the next monthly meeting.
The same principle carries through to payroll. Data captured in Bob now flows straight through via a direct integration with Inflo’s new payroll software provider, Remote, replacing the manual exceptions spreadsheet and the duplication errors that came with re-entering the same information twice.
Even if we look at hiring. Candidates now book their own interview slots directly in Bob, cutting out the endless back-and-forth of matching a hiring manager’s diary against a candidate’s. And managers now have the ability to shortlist through Bob, instead of working through email threads and spreadsheets.
Inflo has also built two dedicated talent pools within Bob, one in the UK and one in the US. So when strong candidates who aren’t right for today’s opening stay warm for the next one, and Inflo has already hired directly out of both pools.
Becoming an extension of the business
The augmentation of tasks has completely changed how HR shows up to the business. Michelle also noticed it herself, with the conversations she is being pulled into completely changed. HR is no longer seen as the admin function. It has become, what Michelle likes to call, “the enabler” of business decisions.
Even Inflo’s Chief Marketing Officer told her it felt like her team wasn’t the People team anymore. But instead, it was an extension of his.
It’s not just one leader’s impression, either. With career progression frameworks launched company-wide this year, every employee can now see exactly what each level in their role requires – from A through to C – and what it pays, without ever having to ask HR directly. It’s one more example of Bob turning something that only used to live in HR, into something transparent and self-service for the whole business. We can’t wait for Bob Companion to be launched which will support staff even further.
Flexibility that grows with you
For a business that lives and breathes numbers, Bob has given Inflo’s People team the tool to speak the same language across the business. What started as a move to consolidate their HR tech stack has grown into something the rest of the business now relies on: data people trust, a seat at more tables, and the headspace to focus on people instead of paperwork.
Inflo’s story with Bob is still being written. But if the last year is anything to go by, the People team isn’t slowing down, and we look forward to hearing more about their successes.
“It’s absolutely helped us to be enablers rather than firefighters.” says Michelle.
Main takeaways
- 85% of employees logged into Bob within four days of launch, driven by a company-wide scavenger hunt tied to a duck race
- Kickoff to full company-wide launch in just over ten weeks, spanning Core HR, Hiring, and Talent, rolled out in stages rather than all at once
- A custom People Leadership Tracker, built in Bob with Bob’s AI assistant
- Quarterly check-ins built around a single mandatory question drove completion rates up, giving Michelle a full performance snapshot in minutes instead of hours
- Two dedicated talent pools have already led to direct hires, cutting down the time and admin spent on recruitment
