Why own a bike when you can subscribe to one? No maintenance headaches, no hunting for a repair shop — just hand your old one in and ride away on a fresh one. That is the ethos of the bike subscription service organization, Swapfiets.
It’s a concept that took off fast, growing from a few student cities in the Netherlands in 2014 to eight countries and over a million subscribers today. But hypergrowth has a habit of outrunning tech infrastructure. And by 2023, that’s exactly what was happening in Swapfiets HR function. The systems Swapfiets had built their people operations on were struggling to keep up — creating more work, at exactly the moment the business was pushing hard toward profitability.
That’s when they found Bob. And what happened next was a full reset of how HR works at Swapfiets.
Too much complexity, not enough control
In 2023, as Swapfiets pushed into new countries and headcount climbed, Gideon Evers, HRIT Manager at Swapfiets, and his team found themselves on an intentional path towards HR tech stack consolidation — moving away from a patchwork of local payroll tools toward a single integrated suite covering HR, payroll, time, and attendance, all in one place.
But as Swapfiets scaled, the cracks started to show. Payroll ran inaccuracies every cycle, it’s core HR system at the time was centrally owned, and controlled by the vendor, which meant any change Swapfiets wanted — whether it be a new field, a localized onboarding form, or a country-specific workflow — had to go through a long queue that rarely moved quickly.
The ops team was finding itself spending more on reconciling data than ever before, leaving them looking for a HRIS platform that gave them more direct control. But what Swapfiets wanted wasn’t the most feature-heavy system on the market. It was an HR system they could configure themselves, adapt as they grew, and implement without becoming permanently dependent on outside consultants to keep it running.
After going through a thorough evaluation process, Bob took center stage.
An implementation that turned heads
So, in May 2025, Swapfiets officially joined the HiBob family. By November 2025, Core HR was live in its first four countries. And by January 2026, every country was live, including full payroll integration with their new payroll partner, Remote.
Eight countries. Eight months. Done entirely in-house.
Gideon and his colleague Matthias Plum, HR Project Manager, led the implementation themselves — working through the Bob training materials ahead of kick-off and running weekly check-ins with their Bob implementation consultants. However, in all honesty, they didn’t need much guidance. After three years of being locked out of their own system, the motivation was there, ready to get the ball rolling.
Even their PMO lead had said it couldn’t be done in the timeframe. They proved otherwise. In fact, when Swapfiets held its global end-of-year company meeting, the project was nominated for and won the internal ‘Make It Happen’ award, named after one of Swapfiets’ four core values.
It’s since become an internal benchmark for how to run a technology project at Swapfiets.
A golden thread connecting the entire employee experience
Before Bob, Swapfiets had seven separate HR tools covering different parts of the employee journey — performance, learning, hiring, surveys, and more. After go-live, most of that was consolidated into one place. And that difference was nothing less than experiential.
When a new joiner comes in now, their journey starts in Bob and stays there. Their contract is generated through hiring, they move automatically into Core HR, and from day one, they can watch a video about their first shift as a bike mechanic, complete onboarding training, and start getting to know their colleagues — all in the same platform.
For a business that had seen early-tenure turnover climb when people didn’t connect quickly with the role, that kind of first impression has made all the difference.
Learning went live across the business in March and April 2026, alongside performance and development. And the employee survey (something Swapfiets had been wanting to run for some time) went out in May 2026, with segmentation and filtering built directly from the data already sitting in Bob. No exporting to a third-party tool, no manual categorization.
Managers now submit promotion and salary change requests directly through Bob, rather than emailing HR. The people ops team has a clean workflow instead of an inbox full of one-off requests. And because Bob integrates directly with Remote, payslips flow through automatically the moment payroll closes — no manual distribution, no extra steps in between.
And the employees love Bob. The CHRO put up a poll on the Bob homepage asking the whole company what they thought of the new system, and the majority voted pro-Bob. Double win for Swapfiests, because we all know change can hold a lot of resistance.
The freedom to run HR their way
One of the clearest signs of how much has changed is that, when Swapfiets recently acquired a new company called Dance, onboarding new employees into Bob was straightforward. New entities, new fields, new values — all configured in-house, without a single support ticket or a lengthy wait.
That kind of self-service runs through everything now. Need to update a field across 1,200 employee records? Export, edit, re-upload, done in 15 minutes. Want to localize an onboarding workflow for a specific country? Build it yourself. Want to shorten the steps between a signed offer and a sent contract, something that has been costing Swapfiets candidates to competitors in the final stretch? Change the process directly in Bob.
And the savings, so far? Swapfiets modeled the full cost comparison — licensing, implementation, and ongoing management — and, with Bob and Remote, they’re on track to break even by 2027. In fact, the $100K they were spending annually on consultancy to maintain the old setup? That’s already gone.
This is just the beginning
With all it’s success, Swapfiets is now turning its attention to Workforce Planning and Compensation, with position management as the headline goal — empowering managers to own their headcount and making the connection between demand, budget, and hiring more visible across the business.
Skills is on the roadmap too, and Swapfiets is already exploring how to connect Bob with AI tools for HR — one of the first teams within the wider business to be doing so.
But the bigger picture is that the People and Culture function is now taken more seriously across the organization. One that’s part of IT strategy conversations, featured in internal award ceremonies, and trusted to run complex, multi-country implementations without outside help.
With Bob running underneath it all, Swapfiets’ people team has the stability to stop reacting and the space to start leading. And that’s exactly what they’re doing.
Main takeaways
- ~$100K in annual consultancy costs eliminated, as Bob gave Swapfiets the tools to configure, manage, and scale their HR entirely in-house
- 8 countries live in 8 months, with Core HR, Hiring, and payroll integration implemented without an external implementation partner
- 7 HR tools consolidated into one platform, giving every employee a single, connected experience from hire to retire
- Break-even projected for 2027, with ongoing cost savings expected to grow as Workforce Planning and Compensation come online
