Make helps Bookbot cut employee onboarding time by 65%

How Bookbot shortened onboarding time from over an hour to just 21 minutes per hire and saved 25+ hours on document signing using Make.

• Industry: E-commerce

• Use cases: HR

• Country: Czech Republic

Bookbot, a second-hand book retailer, ranks among the top sellers in Czechia for both used and new books. However, their business extends beyond Czechia, with operations in Slovakia, Austria, and Germany, and plans to expand into five more countries.

Using Make for around half a year, Bookbot’s HR team has automated part-time employee onboarding and annual tax declaration signing with creative workflows, integrating tools like Google Sheets, Giriton, Signi, and more.

The Head of HR, Kateřina Nushartová, and HR Operations Specialist, Anna Fučíková, explain how automating their operations eliminates administrative tasks, reduces human errors, and saves each employee between 8 to 16 hours of work per month—adding up to 96 to 192 hours annually.

“With Make, we can invest time into people-facing tasks while the automation takes care of administration. There is more space to grow and improve in what matters. The platform has become an inseparable part of our operations.”

The challenges 

Before implementing Make, Bookbot was hampered by administrative tasks, preventing them from fully focusing on their core business processes:

• Overwhelming hiring periods: Especially in the pre-Christmas season, Bookbot has to hire from 100 to 200 temporary employees each month. Before implementing Make, onboarding a single part-time worker took more than 1 hour. That overwhelmed the team and diverted too many resources away from strategic tasks. 

• Manually collecting 700+ signatures: Each year, the HR team collects tax declaration signatures from employees requesting a tax reduction on their salary. Before automation, they had to reach out individually, spending about two minutes per person—over 760 times. While two minutes may seem small, it added up to more than three full workdays.

The solutions 

Turning to Make for help, Bookbot could streamline most of its hiring processes and administrative hurdles connected to signing documentation.

Automating the entire employee onboarding process

Using Make, Kateřina and Anna built a workflow that streamlines the entire onboarding journey of their recruits—from creating a new employee record in their internal systems to sending contracts for signing. 

When a hire accepts an offer, an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), Recruitis, sends them a Google Form to fill out. The form collects essential employee information (e.g., name, email, tax preferences) and feeds them into an internal Google Sheets tracking document via Webhooks. The actual Make workflow is triggered when the Bookbot team updates the Google Sheet with the new hire’s starting date. Using the Router module, Make automatically:

• Creates a new employee entry in Bookbot’s attendance tracking application, Giriton.

• Generates and sends a work contract to the new hire for signing via Signi, an electronic signature platform.

• Prepares a customized taxpayer’s declaration document for tax reduction.

• Adds a new contact to Bookbot’s internal contact database.

“We broke down every step of the hiring process and used Make to automate tasks that don’t need human attention. It reduced errors and cut the onboarding time of one temporary worker from over an hour to only 21 minutes.”

Saving 25+ hours on collecting signatures

In just 30 minutes, Anna built an automation for tax declaration signing, saving over 25 hours of manual work. Instead of collecting signatures on paper, she designed a simple yet powerful workflow.

The workflow starts with the Google Sheets document, containing employee data extracted from a Google Form. Make first searches Google Sheets for employees who need to sign their tax declaration form, using key details like their name, tax status, or form submission date. Once the relevant data is found, the workflow sends an HTTP request to Signi to generate and distribute the document for signing. 

“Make saved us hours of work by automating the entire tax declaration process—from generating forms to tracking signatures. It reduced the workload from days to just a few clicks and freed up resources for other priorities.”

The results

Partnering with Make helped Bookbot achieve impressive results:

• Saving €2,662 (66,816 CZK) in labor costs annually by automating employee onboarding.

• Lowering onboarding time from over 1 hour to just 21 minutes per hire.

• Reducing labor costs by €418 (10,480 CZK) in a one-time saving via automated tax declaration signing.

• Cutting annual tax declaration processing time by over 25 hours. 

• Removing 8–16 hours of manual work per person each month—freeing up 96 to 192 hours per year.

Why are Make & Bookbot the perfect match?

From automatically onboarding hundreds of temporary employees in peak season to streamlining signature collection, Make removed much of Bookbot’s manual work, supporting their local and international growth ambitions.

By cutting onboarding time by 65%, saving 25.5 hours on tax declaration signing, and significantly cutting administrative costs, Bookbot can fully focus on its true purpose—giving each used book a new home.

“Make lets us run HR processes with the same efficiency as our e-commerce operations. What took us days now happens in minutes, allowing our team to spend time on people, not paperwork.”

Ready to automate your workflows like Bookbot? Get started with Make for free.