SD Biosensor's Talent & Culture Team is made up of an HRM part and an HRD part. It manages around 660 people across five job families — research, general office, production, field-specialist, and technical roles. Each family works differently, and exceptions like night shifts and staggered hours are far from rare. With worksites scattered across five locations nationwide, building a consistent HR operating model was a standing challenge in itself. Before talenx, the team's biggest pain was tallying overtime (OT) data. The legacy groupware couldn't download data by month, so the owner had to download it day by day and add it up across the company and by team — over and over, by hand. Organizing a full year of OT data took more than a week, and review cycles, run by mass-emailing forms and then collecting them manually, demanded at least a week as well.
Of all the HR solutions out there, what was the decisive moment that led you to choose talenx?
The first thing we adopted was the performance review module. Management had a strong need for "an always-on way to motivate people," and the fact that talenx could implement a badge system was decisive. At the time we compared three options, including another solution and an on-premise build, but in a period when business targets shifted constantly under the pandemic, we needed a structure that could motivate people flexibly rather than through fixed KPIs.
On top of that, our trust in HCG as a company was substantial. We'd used HCG services before, so we were confident the product carried real HR know-how. One of our team members had used a large foreign solution at a previous job and found it exhausting to keep dealing with support staff who didn't understand HR practice. The talenx team has that understanding built in, so working with them feels completely different.
Adopting a service that didn't yet have many references — was there any pushback internally?
Honestly, reporting a young service without many references to management was a burden. But there were things that were only possible precisely because of that timing. They responded to feature requests right away, and the speed of feedback was on another level. The same went for the attendance module. Having watched the review module steadily mature over three years of use, we were confident the attendance module would develop the same way. SD Biosensor holds the title of being the first to adopt talenx's groupware integration and various new features (laughs). Being first meant the early errors weren't exactly zero, but fast response and resolution always came faster. Thanks to that, we now run the system stably and well.
Before and after adoption, what changed most in day-to-day work?
OT data tallying comes to mind first. Before, downloading files one day at a time and collecting them by hand took more than a week. Now a monthly Excel download plus a little processing finishes it within an hour. Pulling all-nighters before a labor inspector's visit is a thing of the past.
Review operations changed completely too. Moving from email distribution and manual collection to system entry, a process that took at least a week now wraps up within three days. Individual review histories link to the employee record, so we can pull up past data instantly, and exchanging feedback through comments became possible as well.
| Before | After talenx |
| Day-by-day OT data collected by hand (over a week) | Monthly Excel auto-download → done within an hour |
| Manual cross-checking of access records, calling missing staff one by one | Real-time access-control integration + automatic batch alerts |
| Review forms emailed out → collected by hand (at least a week) | System entry + comment feedback → done within 3 days |
| Opaque individual review history, frequent one-off inquiries | Linked to employee records, review history by year viewable instantly |
| Had to open a laptop just to request or approve leave | Request instantly on mobile + managers approve on the spot |
Getting 600 employees used to a new system — was anything harder than expected?
Early on I honestly worried a lot — how do we handle 600 people? So I remember making the FAQ and manual as thorough as possible and running training while capturing each screen one by one.
The change people responded to best was mobile access. Leave requests, business-trip requests, and badge awards that used to require a laptop could now be done straight from a phone. Manager approvals happen on the spot too. One team lead told me, "It's far more convenient than I expected — I especially love being able to handle my team's leave right on mobile," and that one comment cleared away a lot of my early worries.
Have you felt that talenx reflects real HR expertise, not just that of an ordinary software company?
When we shifted annual leave from day-based to hour-based units, there were points that could have become labor-law issues. The talenx team didn't approach it purely as a feature build — they reviewed it together with a labor attorney and steered us so no legal risk would arise. That experience of labor expertise coming along with a system inquiry is something I think only talenx offers.
We also had an employee on reduced hours during pregnancy who was combining that with staggered work hours. Under company rules that working pattern was being processed as an early leave error in the system, and the talenx team quickly identified the cause and flexibly adjusted the settings so it would be recognized as normal work.
Is there a memorable episode around response speed or issue resolution?
There were plenty of issues in the early days of launch, and they responded really fast through that period. The hands-on support left me both apologetic and grateful. It wasn't just handling requests — it felt like solving problems together, and I think that's still the foundation of our trust. With other vendors, the default is often that you can only submit inquiries as posts rather than by phone, and even after posting you wait a day or more for a reply. Once you've experienced how talenx responds, that kind of setup starts to feel strange (laughs).
Do you have ideas for how you'll use talenx's AI features going forward?
Two main ones. The first is review summarization. Right now we write reviews by copying and pasting between Excel and a notepad, so it would help to have AI quickly check whether subjective and objective criteria are balanced.
The second is trend analysis. For new evaluators, show how other evaluators in the organization have rated over the past year or two; for repeat evaluators, analyze their own rating patterns so they can recognize distortions like leniency bias themselves. I think it would genuinely help raise the fairness of reviews.
What would you say to a company weighing talenx? Any advice as an adoption veteran to HR practitioners facing similar questions?
If your data is scattered and you feel worn down by repetitive manual work across multiple tools, you'll feel the impact strongly. Especially if you run attendance, reviews, and goal management on separate systems, simply moving to an integrated platform makes a visible difference in efficiency.
