Advancer is a HR consulting and team building firm, but not in the traditional way. It combines HR consulting and technology to provide clients with the best end-to-end HR, leadership, and people and cultural services.
Advancer was inspired by events close to home for CEO and founder Ceri Jury.
“Back in 2015, I recognised that my husband Llew Jury - who was the founder of a globally growing digital businesses - was mostly kept up at night worrying about HR compliance and people-related issues,” Ceri says.
“This is what motivated me to start a company that delivered people-related services, but with a focus on developing the internal capability of clients through great technology. This ensured clients developed the necessary skills to be able to manage their HR without the reliance on expensive HR consultants.”
Advancer’s vision is to ensure every Australian business gets HR confident.
“One in five small- and medium-sized enterprises worry about their ability to keep up with HR compliance and only 30% of small businesses integrate HR technology to automate processes,” Ceri says.
“At Advancer, we help our clients to gain confidence in HR so that they can stop the HR headaches and focus on growing their businesses.”
The biggest highlight for the team so far was in October 2019, when they launched Advancer.ai, which is a powerful SaaS-based HR audit and compliance platform.
“The Advancer.ai tool is designed to transparently and immediately provide clients with information regarding their exposure to HR and workplace health and safety risks, at any stage of the HR journey,” Ceri says.
“Advancer’s unique and powerful platform enables our dedicated HR consulting team to help our clients build relationships with clients and their teams like never before.”
However the team also faces many challenges, especially when it comes to the perception of HR in business.
“The biggest challenge Advancer faces is the negative perception of HR compliance, with the industry enduring undesirable criticism for many decades,” Ceri says.
“I have actively tried to change the way people view the industry by offering a modern and unique perspective on HR that is seperate from everyday processes.”
In 2016 Llew joined Ceri with the focus on helping businesses to improve their digital and technology focus when growing their people and global sales opportunities.
“We soon realised that by combining our experiences that we could revolutionise the HR space and make people management and in particular HR audits and compliance so much easier if the technology was able to reduce the pain points experienced by business owners, management and HR practitioners,” Ceri says.
The team is planning on growing Advancer.ai from an online HR audit and compliance tool to one that uses machine learning to provide risk ratings on documents such as employee contracts and policies.
“Soon Advancer will have the capacity to link into existing platforms and ultimately the platform will ensure alignment with role descriptions and key performance indicators to the fit of the organisational strategic plan,” Ceri says.
“We have been validating the Advancer.ai platform with small and medium businesses over the past few months and after receiving positive feedback, we are now starting to work with larger global organisations to co-design for future feature releases of the platform and the roadmap."
