The Adyen formula: Massive scale onboarding

Listening to Spotify? Taking an Uber? Buying your favorite dress at Mango? Adyen makes it possible for you to pay anywhere, on any device. The platform was built to simplify and accelerate global payments.

With a personalized checkout experience, customers can use their preferred payment type; online, in app, or in store no matter where in the world. And that’s exactly where they are located, all over the world. With 24 international offices and more than 1700 employees, they are looking for new people every day.

But as a fast scaling company in hypergrowth, the biggest challenge is finding and onboarding the right people. Fast. In this customer story you will discover the importance of personalized clothing as part of an original and motivating welcome gift to your employees.

The Adyen platform enables merchants to accept payments in a single system, enabling revenue growth online, on mobile devices and at the point of sale. Their international nature ensures that they redefine payments for the world’s leading companies such as Microsoft, McDonalds, Uber, Spotify and Booking.com.

With an annual growth rate of 90%, the Dutch firm experiences hypergrowth, a phase of rapid expansion. As experts, they aim to help businesses grow, the co-founders set out to build a platform capable of meeting the rapidly evolving needs of today's fast-growing global businesses.

As of today, Adyen is located in 24 offices around the world from Amsterdam to Sydney. With accelerated digitization of global e-commerce due the COVID-19 pandemic, the company was able to benefit even more. Therefore to persist their hypergrowth they need to continue to attract new talents from all over the world. And it must be done fast, while protecting the people and culture of the company. Making a new staff member feel welcomed from his or her own living room, most likely on the other side of the world, is almost impossible.

Even though we know a strong onboarding is the solution, many of us are still failing to implement consistent strategies. Up to 20% of employee turnover happens in the first 45 days, because they experienced a bad onboarding. Turnover costs can damage your bottom line in a big way. Companies lose 25% of all new employees within 1 year. (Forbes)

Regardless of whether new employee onboarding is in-office or virtual, the stats are here to remind us just how onboarding solutions are important. So together, Adyen and Sunday’s thought out an onboarding strategy.

Unemployment is low, job openings are high, and people have many choices when it comes to job opportunities. What if you could welcome them with an onboarding package filled with personalized items? And that's exactly what we did for Adyen. Together with the client we determined the goals of the onboarding process combined with some key moments. When a new employee joins the Adyen family, he or she receives an onboarding box one week before their very first day. Not only does this enable the new employees to work in style, the clothing also ensures that they feel and look like part of the team.

Did you know great employee onboarding can improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity over 70%? Together with Adyen, we created a strategy based on their core values and their culture to ensure that new employees feel one with the company. So they can reflect the company culture both internally behind their desk as well as externally to family and friends. This makes sure that new hires fit in right away and feel good about themselves in the new team. When people feel better they achieve higher goals.

As a major growing player in the industry, Adyen wants to take the lead in choosing sustainability. A great match with Sunday, we want to make a lasting positive impact on the planet. We work exclusively with certified materials, this ranges from organic cotton to recycled polyester.

Because of our ethical & ecological promises, we only produce within the European Union. This means we only work with partners and factories that maintain the highest ethical values. Like the Dutch company we oppose disposable fashion, so we only produce company fashion that people will actually wear!

Not only is it important to attract new people, but to stimulate your current employees is an essential task for management. As we speak Adyen has more than 1700 employees with over a 100 different nationalities. After consulting her employees, Adyen could only detect more motivated employees. So they decided to further integrate the new way of onboarding and made Company Fashion part of their corporate culture. After receiving the outcome of the experiment they ordered another 1000 hoodies!

Don’t forget: the feeling of unity is very important for your staff, if you want them striving for a unified goal.