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How Huuva's solo HR turned a hundred-click job into one prompt using Taito.ai
How Huuva's solo HR left an underused HiBob setup for Taito.ai — Nordic time-off calculation that finally works, and a hundred-click data job turned into a single prompt.
How Huuva’s solo HR turned a hundred-click job into one prompt using Taito.ai
Huuva brings the nation’s favourite fast-casual restaurants closer to home, democratizing access to great food across the suburbs and smaller cities. The company is backed by investors including General Catalyst and Lifeline Ventures. Today that’s 120 employees across 15 restaurants, most of them in the kitchen, opening a new location roughly every two months. After outgrowing an expensive, underused HiBob setup, and never getting Nordic time-off calculation to actually work, Huuva moved to Taito.ai. Leave calculation now works correctly, updating employee data stopped meaning a hundred clicks, and a performance review cycle went out to 30 kitchen managers without a single question back to HR.
TL;DR
- Huuva: 120 employees (111 kitchen, 9 office) across 15 restaurants, opening a new location roughly every two months, run by one person on the HR side
- Problem: HiBob was expensive and underused, support was slow, and employee time-off law edge cases were never properly solved
- Result: Time-off calculation that finally works, employee data updates that no longer mean clicking through 100 people one at a time, and a performance review cycle that raised zero questions back to HR — all using Taito.ai
One HR person, a footprint that keeps growing
Her job, solo. Martta Jämsén has been Huuva’s only dedicated people-ops hire since a year after the company was founded in 2021. As Operations Lead, Martta’s work covers payroll, employee data, onboarding and offboarding, time-off bookkeeping, employment contracts, and two separate collective bargaining agreements — one for office staff, one for kitchen staff. She also owns most of the company’s internal tooling (she came out of IT originally), and still steps into pure operations when needed: training new kitchen staff, or helping open a new terrace, just to give a few examples.
Huuva brings favourite fast-casual restaurants closer to home in the suburbs and smaller cities.
- People ops
- Run by a team of one
- Headcount
- 120 employees · 111 kitchen, 9 office
- Footprint
- 15 restaurants · a new one ~every 2 months
- Backers
- General Catalyst · Lifeline Ventures
Paying a lot for a legacy HR tool almost nobody used
Cost versus usage. “One of the first things was that HiBob is quite an expensive system compared to how much we used it,” Martta says. “I felt like we weren’t using it enough to justify what we were paying for it.” She was essentially the only person who logged in regularly, and its module-based pricing meant paying for a set of features that didn’t match what Huuva actually needed. Support didn’t help either: by her account, answers were often slow, sometimes a week or more, and often amounted to “no” when they came. She’d also gotten a taste for AI-assisted tools by then, and felt a big, slower-moving vendor wasn’t going to keep pace with that appetite.
The Saturday rule, and other time-off edge cases. The most concrete pain point was Nordic leave law, especially for Finland: paid annual leave accrues on a six-day week, a calculation most international HR platforms don’t get right out of the box. Martta tried the workarounds other Finnish people operators had shared, but hers never actually got fixed other than with manual workarounds.
In our previous HR setup, time-off calculation just didn’t work, so I had to build my own workarounds for it.
— Martta Jämsén, Operations Lead at Huuva
Taito.ai’s setup didn’t need explaining
Setup, without the friction. Setup of Taito.ai moved fast enough that Martta couldn’t put a number on how long it took her, because it didn’t take long enough to need one. The data she handed over didn’t need to be clean: Taito.ai’s agent asked a few confirming questions in chat, she approved them, and it went through — “fairly painlessly,” as she put it.
All things people ops — available in Slack. Taito.ai being Slack-native mattered to the Huuva team, and it held up in practice. Staff have told her that having Taito.ai live inside Slack lowers the bar to actually use it, compared to yet another separate website.
Time-off calculation that finally works, and a single chat message that replaces 100 clicks
Time-off calculation automated, finally. Finnish annual leave calculation, sick leaves, and parental leaves have worked correctly from the start, and that’s built trust beyond the feature itself: “It feels like we’re in good, capable hands, because you clearly know what you’re talking about.” A pointed contrast to explaining the annual leave Saturday rule to a vendor that never solved it.
From 100 manual salary updates to just one chat. The clearest change is what happens when employee data needs updating: compensation adjustments, salary changes, new hires. “It’s so boring normally, clicking a hundred times for everything,” Martta says of the old way, pointing to this summer’s collective-agreement index raises, which touched pay for 100+ kitchen staff, one employee at a time. On Taito.ai, the same update means telling the agent what changed, in chat. What used to be 100 manual updates is now a single prompt.
The highest-stakes test: bi-annual performance reviews. Huuva ran a full performance review cycle on Taito.ai shortly after switching. Reviews aren’t optional at Huuva — they’re part of the job — and this time 30 kitchen managers who aren’t especially technical completed everything on their own, without asking Martta a single question. That’s unusual: a new tool almost always generates a wave of questions. This one didn’t.
Would recommend Taito.ai. She’d recommend the platform to anyone in a similar seat, especially a solo people-ops or HR generalist managing a real headcount: easy to use, easy to customize to your own needs, and backed by a team that’s clearly invested in improving the product.
With Taito.ai, you don’t have to read some manual and figure out how things work, because it’s all intuitive — you can just ask the chat.
— Martta Jämsén, Operations Lead at Huuva
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