Building the HRIS for Rooster

Rooster began as a promising recruitment tool. With a clean job board and a growing Applicant Tracking System (ATS), they were already helping companies attract top talent efficiently in Sri-Lanka. But the team at Rooster had bigger ambitions : to become a comprehensive Human Resource Management platform that supports organizations not just in hiring, but also in managing and retaining talent.

That’s where Product Tavern came in. Rooster partnered with us to build out the next critical piece of their product: a full-featured Human Resource Information System (HRIS). The goal was to transform Rooster from a recruitment-only tool into a single platform capable of supporting the entire employee lifecycle.

This is how we did it.

The Challenge

Rooster already had a solid foundation with two core features:

• A public-facing Job Board that allowed employers to publish and promote job listings.

• An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that helped hiring teams screen, track, and manage applicants through various hiring stages.

What they didn’t have was an internal-facing HR platform. Once a candidate was hired, there was no way to:

• Create and manage employee records.

• Automate onboarding and offboarding processes.

• Track time off, attendance, or performance.

• Process payroll or manage compensation.

• Enable employees to self-serve HR tasks like updating details or requesting leave.

The team wanted to add all these features without breaking the simplicity and elegance of their current UX. They needed a well-structured HRIS that was modular, scalable, easy to use, and affordable for startups — the core audience they were targeting.

Our Discovery and Planning Process

At Product Tavern, we always begin by understanding the real needs of the business and the end users. We worked closely with Rooster’s founders and product stakeholders to map out the full employee lifecycle after hiring, from day one to exit, and identified the most critical workflows that needed to be digitized.

We conducted working sessions with:

• Internal HR users to understand what processes were currently manual or managed on spreadsheets.

• Early-stage startup founders to uncover what mattered most to them in an HR tool.

• Rooster’s own customer success team to learn what existing clients had been requesting.

This discovery phase allowed us to define the feature set and priorities clearly. We aligned on a roadmap that would allow for the HRIS to be rolled out in phases while still delivering immediate value.

Designing the HRIS

Once we had clarity on the functional scope, our product and design teams began architecting the HRIS experience from scratch.

Key modules we designed included:

Employee Profile Management
We introduced a centralized record system where employee data could be securely stored and updated. Profiles included personal info, documents, job history, compensation, performance reviews, and more.

Onboarding and Offboarding Workflows
We created step-by-step workflows to guide employees and HR teams through a structured onboarding process. This included document collection, policy acknowledgements, welcome messages, and provisioning of accounts or equipment. For offboarding, we enabled exit checklists, feedback forms, and account deactivation tracking.

Time-Off Management
We designed a flexible time-off module that supported various leave types (vacation, sick, unpaid), approval flows, accrual policies, and real-time calendar views for managers and employees.

Payroll & Attendance
We built a simple but extensible framework for tracking attendance and calculating payroll inputs. This included automated timesheets, overtime tracking, and basic compliance checks.

Performance & Reviews
We enabled performance tracking with review cycle management, customizable review templates, and individual goal setting that could be aligned with team or company objectives.

Role-Based Access Control
We ensured HR, managers, and employees had different permission levels across the platform. Sensitive actions and information were locked behind role-specific access.

Each component was prototyped in detail using Figma. We used real-world user stories to validate the flows and edge cases. Our team also defined all the micro-interactions, notification logic, and fallback scenarios to ensure a smooth user experience.

Collaboration with Engineering

One of Rooster’s strengths was their existing engineering team, which had already built the job board and ATS. Our job was to ensure they had everything they needed to implement the HRIS quickly and effectively.

To support a seamless handoff, we delivered:

• A comprehensive design system with reusable components aligned with Rooster’s existing front-end stack.

• Clickable prototypes for all user roles and states.

• A full product specification document, including field-level definitions, workflow diagrams, and rules for conditional logic.

• Suggested backend data models and integration points with the existing ATS.

We stayed on for a few weeks after the handoff to answer questions, adapt designs based on technical feasibility, and ensure product vision was maintained during implementation.

The Outcome

Rooster’s new HRIS launched on schedule and instantly upgraded the value of their platform. It created a third major pillar alongside the Job Board and ATS, enabling Rooster to now offer a full-stack HR solution.

The combined platform now supports businesses in:

• Hiring top talent through the ATS

• Managing employee records, onboarding, and payroll with the HRIS

• Retaining team members via performance and review cycles

The impact was clear:

• Startups using Rooster reduced their recruitment agency costs by over 70%

• Time spent onboarding new hires dropped by 60%

• HR managers saved hours each week thanks to automation and streamlined workflows

• Employee retention improved by creating more transparent review and goal-setting processes

Final Thoughts

Rooster’s evolution into a full HR platform is a testament to what happens when product vision meets strong execution. At Product Tavern, we don’t just help build features. We help companies grow into the next version of themselves.

If you're building a platform and want to expand your offering, or reinvent it entirely, we’d love to talk.