[Top SaaS Series] Building Customizable HR Solutions That Scale With Krishna Surendra

Krishna Surendra is the CEO of HR Cloud, a human resources software company that offers tools for recruiting, onboarding, employee engagement, performance management, HRIS, and internal communications — all designed to automate HR processes and enhance workplace culture. He joined HR Cloud in 2016 as Director of Engineering, advanced to Chief Technology Officer in 2018, and took on the role of CEO in 2021. With a background in computer science, he brings deep technical expertise and leadership to his role. Under Krishna’s direction, HR Cloud continues to scale its offerings in employee engagement, onboarding automation, and HRIS solutions to drive productivity and retention in organizations.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:09] Why fully customizable HR solutions outperform cookie-cutter platforms
• [04:04] Boosting employee engagement with real-time communication tools
• [06:48] Why instant rewards outperform traditional performance reviews
• [08:04] Krishna Surendra’s path from tech engineer to SaaS HR founder
• [11:01] The evolution of HR Cloud’s modular feature set
• [12:33] How customer feedback drives HR Cloud’s product roadmap
• [14:09] Lessons learned from failed product launches and smart pivots
• [18:02] Criteria HR Cloud uses to launch new features based on real need
• [28:28] Common onboarding mistakes companies make with new employees
• [38:52] HR Cloud’s build vs. buy approach to adding new features and tools

In this episode…

Many organizations struggle to deliver a seamless and engaging employee experience from hiring to offboarding. Generic HR tools often fail to adapt to unique workflows, resulting in inefficient processes, poor communication, and disengaged staff. How can companies modernize their HR systems to be both efficient and deeply human-centered?

Krishna Surendra, an expert in HR technology, shares strategies for building customizable, automated HR workflows that span the entire employee lifecycle. Krishna emphasizes the importance of gathering ongoing customer feedback, prioritizing modules based on real demand, and integrating with existing systems rather than reinventing every feature. He also outlines practical ways to increase engagement — such as two-way communication channels, spot recognition with rewards, and adapting solutions for unique use cases like deskless workers or younger staff who prefer SMS notifications — while avoiding common onboarding mistakes like failing to document processes or track task completion.

In this episode of Inspired Insider, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Krishna Surendra, CEO of HR Cloud, about transforming the employee journey through adaptable HR software. Krishna discusses using customer-driven product development, enhancing engagement through recognition and feedback tools, and integrating with payroll systems. He also shares insights on prioritizing new features, addressing unique client needs, and lessons learned from build vs. buy decisions.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Krishna Surendra on LinkedIn
• HR Cloud
• Workmates
• Never Lose a Customer Again: Turn Any Sale into Lifelong Loyalty in 100 Days by Joey Coleman
• Never Lose an Employee Again: The Simple Path to Remarkable Retention by Joey Coleman
• Osmose Utilities Services Company
• UKG
• Damir Davidovic on LinkedIn
• Blaine Ornburg on LinkedIn
• The 5AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life. by Robin Sharma
• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do by Robert T. Kiyosaki
• The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Fable About Fulfilling Your Dreams & Reaching Your Destiny The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin Sharma

Special mentions:

• Joey Coleman on LinkedIn
• Owen McGab Enaohwo on LinkedIn

Related episodes:

• “Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[SaaS Series & Israel Business Series] The SaaS Growth Playbook With David Bitton of DoorLoop” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Combining Religion, Business, and Philanthropy with Steve Sarowitz, Founder of Paylocity and Blue Marble Payroll” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Giver Series] How to Keep Your Best Customers And Build Lasting Business Relationships” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Black Business Leaders Series] Insource: How to Increase Efficiency with Existing Staff and Rapidly Onboard New Staff with Owen McGab Enaohwo of SweetProcess” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “If you don’t have your onboarding process mapped out, no system in the world can help you.”
• “We listen to customer feedback and don’t wait long to build features that make sense for others too.”
• “You can’t just build a product without thinking about the numbers and operations — there has to be balance.”
• “With our solution, managers can recognize and reward employees instantly, without waiting for annual reviews.”
• “If you build for employees’ daily needs, adoption is much stickier — and it’s harder for companies to switch away.”

Action steps:

1. Gather and document clear onboarding processes: Develop a step-by-step plan to ensure smooth and consistent onboarding, reducing confusion and missed tasks where processes are not well documented.
2. Leverage regular employee feedback and engagement tools: Use surveys and pulse checks to understand employee sentiment and foster motivation, engagement, and retention through two-way communication.
3. Recognize and reward achievements in real time: Use spot recognition such as shout-outs or small rewards to keep employees motivated and appreciated without waiting for annual reviews.
4. Prioritize customization and automation in HR workflows: Tailor software and processes to fit specific needs, enabling seamless onboarding, communication, and compliance while avoiding one-size-fits-all solutions.
5. Regularly review and update HR technology based on feedback and trends: Continuously gather insights from clients and teams to keep HR solutions relevant and adaptable to changing organizational and market needs.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder of InspiredInsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Krishna Surendra of HR Cloud and Krishna, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out.

Since this is part of the top SaaS series, some other really good interviews to check out.

The co-founder of Zapier, Wade Foster, came on and talked about growing Zapier, which was interesting. One of the co-founders of Pipedrive came on at that point, Krishna. They were around 10,000 customers. Now I think they’re over 100,000. So they’ve grown quite a bit. That was an interesting story. One of the founders of DoorLoop also, I can’t remember. I think they raised over $150 million, and they grew quickly to like 200 people in a short order. So it was interesting to hear that amount of growth. You have to fact check me, I can’t remember, I’m off the top of my head there. But anyways, impressive start to a company and founder on what they do. So check those out and more on InspiredInsider.com. 

This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in a few ways. One, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. So we do the strategy, the accountability, and the full execution and production. Number two, we are an easy button for a company’s gifting. So we make gifting and staying top of mind to your clients, partners and prospects easy and affordable. Audible. So all you do is give us the addresses and we’ll do everything else. We’ll curate the gifts. We’ll send them out over time. It’s all your branding and everything like that. So we also will get people on podcasts as well. 

So Krishna in general, we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it stress free for a company so they can build amazing relationships. You know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships, and I always look at ways to give to my best relationships. And I found no better way to profile the people and companies I admire on my podcast and send them sweet treats in the mail. So you can check everything out at Rise25.com, or email us at [email protected]. 

I am excited to introduce Krishna Surendra. He’s the CEO of HR Cloud. HR Cloud is a leading air tech company transforming how organizations onboard, engage and recognize their employees. HR Cloud is an all-in-one HR software to power really every stage of the employee journey. And Krishna, I’ll have you tell us more. But thanks for joining me. 

Just talk to people a little bit about HR Cloud and what you do. And there’s a video version of you’re listening. I’m going to pull it up so we can check it out.

Krishna Surendra: 03:09

Sure. So yeah, you summed it up pretty much. We are an all in one HR software primarily focused on US businesses, and what we add value to our customers is a way we can customize the solution for every customer’s needs, as opposed to a cookie cutter solution, which is offered by general HR providers. We offer solutions where you can completely customize the software for your needs, and we can automate your entire HR workflow from hiring, onboarding, any changes throughout the employee lifecycle, and also onboarding an employee when they leave the organization. So essentially customize automate the workflows on top of it.

We have a separate brand which is called Workmates where we do three things, which is employee engagement, communication and rewards.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:01

Talk about that for a second. How does that work?

Krishna Surendra: 04:04

Yeah, definitely. So this is a solution as I mentioned, which does three things. So imagine if you want to get a pulse of your employees. How do they feel about the company or the manager or the organization? We have a way where we can create communities just like LinkedIn, but for your company, and we have a provision to send a NPS survey where you can get the pulse of an employee.

How do they feel about the company, the manager, or the organization on top of it? We have a way where we can streamline communication not just top down, but bottom up. Top down would be typically more like where you have a large organization, where you send a company newsletter where everybody gets to know what’s going on in a company, like an announcement of sorts. That’s one way. The other way is we can have these communication paths where every department or every location can have their own communication happening within a channel or a community. 

So we can do that where you get two way communication between managers and as well as employees, where you can have a way to capture the information from the employee and you can hear their voice. Right. So that way if you have a problem, you get to know directly from them. And you can also have a way where you can measure the engagement. So if for any reason, if the employees are not engaged, then there’s no reason for them to be much more productive when it comes to their work because they’re completely disengaged with our solution, you can make sure that you can engage the employees and then listen to them get their feedback and then do spot recognition. 

So as a manager, if I see my developer doing a good job now, I have my teams as an example. We have a team set up in Croatia, Europe and Vietnam. If someone does a really good job so I as a manager can create a shout out, hey, this person did an amazing job. Thank you very much. You helped me close this deal and I can create it using the platform and everybody within the organization, they will know that you know so and so did a good job. And he got a kudos from the CEO. And on top of it, if your culture or company lets you do the reward. So you can also give them a gift card and then as a point through the platform, and then they can redeem it for a gift card like an Amazon gift card or Nike or anything like that.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:39

I wanted to hear about that. Yeah, from a rewards standpoint, what have you found does well and performs well?

Krishna Surendra: 06:48

Yeah, definitely. Because traditionally the performance reviews happen every year. That’s how usually it is done, or semi-annually or quarterly. But you don’t have to wait for the entire performance evaluation cycle to happen to get a bonus through our solution. As a manager, you can reward your employee for a good job that he has done and then reward him for a bonus point.

And these bonuses are not huge like a bonus, right? This is more like a gift card. $500 points that could be redeemed for one of these gift cards. And you don’t need an HR or a CEO approval for this. You as a manager should have a budget to keep your employees engaged. And you can just do that at your disposal.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:28

No, I love that. I noticed in the front of this it says five-day Hawaii vacation. Can you send me that one? Yeah. And then it skips to the gift card.

Wait, wait. Go back to the Hawaii vacation one.

Krishna Surendra: 07:42

I think if you refresh, it’ll look.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:45

Yeah. That’s great. I want to hear why HR. Right. Because you’re a computer, I know your background is in computer science. You could probably code up and create pretty much anything you want. Why HR?

Krishna Surendra: 08:04

There’s two reasons. Obviously, I’m the co-founder for this company. And before I became a CEO, co-founder of HR Cloud, I was part of another company called NEOGOV. That’s a company who’s a market leader in the public sector and a government business. I worked as a director of engineering, developer, lead manager, tech lead, etc., and then director of engineering before the company was sold to a private equity group.

And then I had a choice. I could just continue as a director of engineering and pursue my journey there, or start something new with the existing knowledge that I’ve gained over the years. So that’s when my founder, he started Azure Cloud in 2016-17, and then I switched over as a CTO Chief technology officer, and I’ve learned a lot. So I essentially built the product from the ground up with my team in Vietnam and Croatia with the knowledge that I’ve gained from the previous company. And then we added products and we essentially got the company from literally zero customers all the way to 300 plus customers right now. 

And we serve in various industries. So we’ll get to that later during customer testimonials and case studies. So we started with technology companies. So including us, we are a tech company with four different locations, three plus locations. So we are using it internally and we are building the product. 

We’re learning it and using it as we learn. We added more customers and then we learned from the customers. That’s one thing I cherish. I like to say we do a real good job when it comes to customer feedback, and then making sure we don’t wait a long time to build on those, so we will make sure that we will develop those features if it makes sense to other customers. And then as we grow, then, you know, we try to upsell these feature functionality to other customers. 

And that’s how we ended up adding. I mean, if you go to the website, we started with employee onboarding as the first product, and as we got few customers and they asked, hey, why don’t we have recruitment? Because we like to have recruitment and onboarding. One product suite totally makes sense. So then we started developing this recruitment module and then performance evaluation which is quite natural. 

And how do we attract vacation etc. So we did the vacation module and engagement as well.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:32

So you have recruitment, what was the evolution of the features again.

Krishna Surendra: 10:38

If you could minimize it if you don’t mind do control.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:41

Make it smaller?

Krishna Surendra: 10:42

Yeah. Or enlarge the screen. Yeah. Now if you go to products. Yes. We started with employee onboarding. That’s the first product we started. And then recruitment. We added on top of it. And performance evaluation recruitment human resource performance.

!no name provided!: 11:00

Oh gotcha.

Krishna Surendra: 11:01

HRIS stands for, it’s a basic employee database. So it’s an essential module for all. It connects everything together. And time off is a vacation tracking module and offboarding, it’s the opposite of employee onboarding. You welcome them to the organization and when they exit the organization, make sure everything’s done seamlessly. You do exit surveys, collect their feedback, make sure they have everything that they need when they leave the company, etc. And time clock is a way to capture the time and attendance.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:33

So people like, you know, obviously in this remote world especially, they can kind of clock in and have like when they have flexibility in their schedule, they can do that when they start working.

Krishna Surendra: 11:44

That’s right.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:46

You know, what’s interesting is I’m wondering, how do you keep track of the next module or features, right? Because all this takes a lot of time, energy and effort and then keeping track of it. But then also how do you decide to release the next one. 

Because each of these, this sounds simple, like when you go through it. Oh yeah, we just released this. But each one of these is not easy to do. And then you got to deploy it and then you got to get people using it. So how do you keep track first of all? 

I’m just curious, is there a place where if, you know, a customer asked for something, you log it there and I don’t know, there’s various systems people have. How do you log this ongoing list of potential features and modules?

Krishna Surendra: 12:33

So there’s two ways I mean two ways. But there’s a couple of ways right. So one definitely from the customers. So with our customers we run these regular surveys and oftentimes customer support manager and account manager. They will talk to the customer during renewal and then anytime in the middle on top of it.

I do talk to the customers. I get their feedback. What do they like? What is not working, what is working, what could we do better, etc. and then I look at the competition to see what is generally what’s going on in the HR world, what other apps are missing, what makes sense for us to add it to our platform? That’s the second one. 

And the third one is the sales. During a sales process, if a prospect looks at the website, hey, you have all these modules, why are you missing payroll? Sure. I mean, we can’t do everything, but yeah, that’s a feedback that we often get and then we don’t have a payroll module. And that’s a concierge conscious decision that we made because payroll itself, it deals with a lot of complaints and headaches. 

And we thought it’s better to offer integrations with an existing payroll vendor rather than building our own. And that’s an option we provide our customers. If you hover over integrations, you can see the list of companies that we integrated with. So these are some of the payroll vendors ADP.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:45

We have Intuit. We have actually the founder of Paylocity on oh, Steve Sarowitz. It was a great interview. People can check that out. And then there’s a lot of other integrations.

I mean, that’s a whole nother animal. You know what I mean. So but it’s interesting. I mean it’s like some people think, well, you’re getting enough requests, but you got to stick to what you’re best at, I guess, too.

Krishna Surendra: 14:09

Exactly. Yeah. So we did some mistakes during development, right? So initially we started onboarding, but then later on we jumped into the engagement module. We started to do a lot more.

We tried to be the next Slack, but the market wasn’t ready. So sure. How would you differentiate between Teams versus Slack versus what we have. And then we pivoted back to onboarding because we had customers using onboarding. Let’s just double down and get more customers. 

And then as we got more customers started using it, Covid happened and obviously people were working remotely. Everybody’s working remotely. And especially for a company like us who have offices in 3 to 4 different locations, it’s really hard to get them connected. And we thought, you know, this platform which is working for us, why don’t we try to push it more, more harder? And that’s when people started leveraging zoom as an example to connect your workforce and then solution like Workmates, where you can use it to reward and recognize your employees. 

And you can have the communication going back and forth from the top down and bottom up within the organization. And we got very good traction on that. And that’s how we, you know, listen to the customers and then to the market. And if it makes sense, invest our time and effort in developing a product.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:30

I’m curious, Krishna, just to get a little granular. Where do you log all these things? I mean you may be talking to people, the sales people talk to people. There’s customer inquiries via email. What do you use a certain project management software like? What do you use to keep track of everything?

Krishna Surendra: 15:46

It’s three ways. We use Jira internally. Atlassian Jira. It’s a project management tool that we use to log the requirements on top of it. We use a variety of tools from asana, Google Sheets and Google Docs.

Teams is something we use for communication. Anytime we get feedback from let’s say a salesperson. Hey, we are missing this feature. This prospect is asking for this. I will look at it. Obviously we don’t have that. And the next thing is to connect with my product team and let them know, hey, do you have this in the roadmap? Yes. Well and good. So we can let the sales team know, hey, we’ll get it in the next two months so you can let the prospect know and promise to buy. Promise to pay, right? Once we deliver, you can pay.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:28

Promise to pay. Exactly.

Krishna Surendra: 16:30

And the second one.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:31

People can say they want it and then be like, you know what? Now I have to pay for it. Maybe not. So that’s a key piece for sure.

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