Here at Hnry, we work alongside many recruitment agencies all across New Zealand. Whilst recruiters are out placing freelancers and contractors in roles, we’re there to support those individuals in managing their financial obligations. Whether someone is a career contractor, or if they’re brand new to contracting, Hnry makes earning an independent income as simple and stress-free as earning via a salary job.
Hnry gives recruiters and contractors alike the peace of mind that all of the financial admin has been taken care of. This means that recruiters can place candidates faster and with ease, adding immense value to their agency and the lives of their candidates.
We sat down with a few recruitment agents to chat about how Hnry helps them:
- Dan Wharakura, Principal Consultant at H2R Technology
- Bernadette Sharkey-Burns, Senior Consultant at Momentum
- Sam Nowell, Principal Consultant at Potentia
- Steve Willoughby, Regional Manager, Techonolgy Transformation & Digital at Beyond Recruitment
How does Hnry help when it comes to placing candidates?
“It’s really easy to engage with you guys and get our contractors going,” says Steve. “So it’s a really valuable service for our contractors, and at a really competitive price. As recruiters, it’s just such an easy service to engage with.”
“It’s a much more personalised service than anything else on the market. I always encourage using Hnry over going with a traditional accountant,” Bernadette says.
Bernadette goes on to explain how her organisation really strives to have a full-service offering available for their contractors, an offering that gives them more time because “everyone has a busy life and not everyone is comfortable when it comes to doing their taxes. For us, Hnry is a great value-add for our contractors.”
For Hnry’s recruitment partners, being able to offer the service to their contractors means that they can provide even more value to their organisation and streamline the set-up process. They’re able to place candidates faster and more confidently because they know that all of the tax admin is being handled by Hnry’s team of experts. “For candidates, joining the service is just seamless,” says Bernadette, “no matter your experience as a contractor.”
And because we at Hnry don’t get involved in contracts or timesheets, recruitment agencies don’t need to worry about ‘integrations’ of any kind. Once the contractor has signed up and set up their account, the recruiter can simply pay directly into the contractor’s Hnry Account and from there the service will automatically handle all of the necessary tax obligations for that contractor.
“Having Hnry on our side means that we have a genuine offering in the toolkit,” adds Sam from Potentia. “It’s really a one-stop shop, which means that people can have confidence in their contracting journey. It’s been really great to offer that safety net to our candidates.”
“For us at H2R,” says Dan, “it’s a combination: supporting the candidate with an extension of the contracting experience, but also commercially it’s helping us to make sure we can fill vacancies. These parts are crucial, not only in getting someone set up and up and running with a contract, but also so that the candidate can feel confident in going into that contract.
If that doesn’t happen, the contract might not get accepted and then the candidate doesn’t continue on in the process. If they get themselves into a position where it becomes too difficult, then they might just default back to looking at other work options, such as permanent employment.”
How would you describe contractors’ interactions with Hnry?
“Hnry just makes things simple,” says Bernadette Sharkey-Burns. “You’re a really responsive and customer-focused team, and for people to have access to that, I think that proves you’re very hands-on and you care about what you’re there to do. Your team wants to make sure that the people who are utilising the service are having a really good experience.”
Hnry caters to both career contractors and those that are brand new to the world of contracting. “A lot of people find themselves in a position where contracting opportunities are available, but they just don’t understand how to get everything set up,” says Dan, whose wife and sister-in-law both use the Hnry service. “So for us, Hnry has been super valuable in this sense.”
“Utilising Hnry means that nothing really changes for contractors if they’re used to being a PAYE employee and having someone else take care of it for them,” adds Bernadette.
In this sense, a contractor who is signed up to Hnry is no different to any other candidate – except that they’re better taken care of. Hnry customers get access to a full range of features (expense management, income allocations, financial insights and reports) that make it easy to work as a contractor. They can pick and choose the features that work best for them, all while operating with the confidence that everything is being handled in the background.
One Hnry customer, for instance, joined the service about a year ago, and at the time, he’d been going through rough times. After getting laid off after twenty years as a permanent member of staff at an IT consultancy, he was left without much choice but to go out contracting. He soon found work through Talent International and, facing the unknown of all of the tax admin, was referred to Hnry. He immediately found that the service alleviated all of his fears. “Without Hnry, I would be living in constant fear of doing something wrong,” he told us at an event a few months ago. “It’s completely changed the way I think about my finances.”
Sam Nowell shared a similar story: “We had a first-time contractor come through to Hnry recently – 18 years he’d been thinking about contracting. He’d built up a fear of it. He just wanted a soft entry into managing his finances as an independent contractor, and Hnry really alleviated some of the anxiety that he had. So that was a big win.”
Hnry co-founder James Fuller remembers this customer: “What’s great is that we had those initial conversations with him, and it really didn’t take that much of our time to alleviate those fears. Now he seems super relaxed – in fact, now that he’s all set up, we don’t actually hear from him much anymore!”
For Steve Willoughby from Beyond Recruitment, Hnry helped solve a lot of the anxiety that they themselves would normally have had to help mitigate. “The service that Hnry provides is seamless and quick. It just makes life easy for so many of the contractors that we place.”
What do your contractors usually say about Hnry?
“They’re always telling me how Hnry is just so easy to deal with,” says Dan. “Probably the biggest thing for them, really, has been the responsiveness: this sense that they can ask questions if they’re unsure and not have that feeling that a) they should know that information to begin with, or b) they’ll be charged by the hour for this information.”
Hnry’s customer success team, which is made up of a mix of customer service and tax experts, is always there to help people switch to Hnry. No question is too difficult or too simple for the team to answer, and they’ll always talk to Hnry customers without the tax jargon or confusion that usually accompanies those conversations with IRD and accountants. “With Hnry, people feel comfortable that they can ask questions and be listened to,” adds Dan.
Not only is the Hnry customer success team readily available, but we have an extensive collection of helpful resources and articles that help guide contractors (both career and brand new) through their careers.
“People love it when we steer them to the resources and the website,” says Sam. “They have an interaction with you guys, and the information you provide, and they can have all of their questions answered, around how their taxes work and what their finances should look like. And so they always come back to us, even before signing the contract to say, ‘thanks for putting me on to Hnry – I feel a lot more comfortable.’’
“Often in our world, no news is good news,” says Steve. “But everyone that I reach out to for feedback about Hnry is really positive.”
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As New Zealand’s fastest-growing tax agency, Hnry handles the tax admin for thousands of Kiwi contractors, helping them feel empowered and supported throughout their careers as independent earners. Reach out to our support team today or check out our resources section on the website to find out how Hnry can help you and your organisation.
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