How a climate tech startup used Plane to boost their hiring efficiency and competitiveness
Regrow Ag is an agriculture tech startup that assists companies across the agricultural supply chain in measuring, reporting, and taking action to reduce on-farm emissions. Named one of TIME’s Top 100 Influential Companies for 2023, Regrow helps farmers adopt regenerative practices and serves more than 100 of today’s leading retailers, consumer packaged goods businesses (CPGs), and processors on their path to reduced emissions and increased resilience. Since 2016, Regrow has helped abate over 600,000 tons of carbon dioxide. A remote-first organization, Regrow prides itself on being able to hire globally anywhere and has 160 team members in 18 countries worldwide.
In 2023, Regrow began hiring rapidly and wanted a solution to make it easier to hire and pay employees globally. While researching potential platforms, they came across Plane and liked its pricing and ease of use. Rohina Batra, Regrow’s CFO at the time, says, “The cost was lower than the traditional international employment agencies and the online platform made it easy to hire.”
With Plane, Regrow has found a reliable platform and team that support their dynamic growth. Maja Valusek, Regrow’s Director of People Operations, especially likes Plane’s guided hiring and onboarding flow. She says, “It’s super easy to onboard. I love that I can add someone into the platform in five minutes, and it starts the whole onboarding process. I haven’t heard any complaints from new hires. It just works. This has been really helpful for us in meeting our goals. When you’re a startup, you need someone hired yesterday and can’t wait six weeks for someone to start.”
Maja also appreciates the responsiveness of Plane’s Support and Hire Ops teams. She says, “There’s always someone from Support on hand. The team is really nice and always tries to resolve things.” Plane’s hands-on support feels nicely personal; Maja says, “I know everyone’s names, and it feels like a mutually beneficial relationship, versus working with a huge organization where you get a different name every time you reach out to Support.” Maja also likes being able to chat on Slack with her customer success manager Jacob, especially since the Regrow team is distributed in different time zones: “That’s been really helpful, that I know that I can reach him on Slack.”
Working with Plane has made Regrow more competitive and attractive as an employer. Maja states, “Plane enabled us to expand our hiring pool and be more competitive. Everyone wants to work remotely, and the fact that people can change countries through Plane is amazing. We had an employee living in Australia who moved to Germany. We worked with Plane on hiring them and transferring them, and it worked out great. That’s been really good for us to be able to not only get the people we need in the right spots, but also retain people that want to move.”
Plane’s flexibility has also been a huge help to Regrow. Maja says, “If we need an earlier start date for an employee, the Plane team will do whatever they can to speed things up and make that happen for us to the best of their ability.” She appreciates that Plane works hard to meet the needs of Regrow’s team members: “We had one new hire that had some custom requests, and the Plane team really went out of their way to meet with her and explain the processes, go back and forth, even amend the contract. So the Plane team is really doing their best.”
Overall, Maja especially recommends Plane for startups looking to grow internationally: “Plane is a great partner for startups that are growing and starting in the space of hiring globally.”