LEAP Legal Software, a global leader in cloud-based legal practice management solutions, has fundamentally transformed its talent acquisition strategy and operational efficiency through an eight-year partnership with Workable, a prominent applicant tracking system (ATS). This strategic collaboration has not only yielded remarkable results, including 100% of US hires over the past year originating from internal referrals and an average time to hire of just four weeks, but has also empowered the company’s lean HR team to manage rapid global expansion with unprecedented agility and precision. The journey underscores the critical role of intuitive, innovative HR technology in supporting growth-stage companies navigating complex, multi-national talent landscapes.
LEAP’s Foundation and Global Ascent
Founded over three decades ago in Australia, LEAP Legal Software has grown from a pioneering local enterprise into a truly global entity, providing essential cloud-based practice management tools specifically designed for small law firms. Its extensive reach now spans Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, supporting approximately 900 employees worldwide. This global footprint, while a testament to the company’s success and product efficacy, presents inherent complexities for human resources and talent acquisition teams tasked with maintaining consistent hiring standards and efficiency across diverse markets and regulatory environments.
The US arm of LEAP, a critical growth engine, focuses on recruiting for vital support, sales, client success, and implementation roles. Overseeing these crucial functions is Susanne Poole, who manages all aspects of people, recruitment, and culture. Like many HR leaders in rapidly expanding technology companies, Poole has often operated as a "team of one," shouldering the immense responsibility of driving the hiring engine while simultaneously managing a myriad of other HR functions. This scenario highlights a common challenge for scaling organizations: how to maintain robust talent pipelines and efficient recruitment processes without an oversized HR department.
The Pre-Workable Bottleneck: A Case Study in Administrative Drag
Prior to adopting Workable in December 2018, LEAP’s recruitment efforts were managed through a module embedded within their existing Human Resources Information System (HRIS). While technically functional, this system proved to be a significant impediment to efficient hiring. Susanne Poole vividly recalls the systemic friction it created at nearly every stage of the recruitment process.
The primary issue was the HRIS module’s clunky and unintuitive interface. Crucially, it lacked automated communication functionalities, meaning that staying abreast of candidate feedback and progression required Poole to manually track down hiring managers, send repeated follow-ups, and constantly remind stakeholders of where candidates stood in the pipeline. For a one-person HR operation supporting a rapidly scaling company, this administrative burden was unsustainable. "I needed our recruitment to be much more efficient and I needed it to be able to talk to the recruiting managers around the business instantly," Poole stated, reflecting on the struggles with their previous system. "We struggled with our previous system in doing that."
Furthermore, the old system offered limited access to various job boards. This constraint was particularly acute for a growing tech company like LEAP, which needed broad distribution of job postings to attract diverse talent across multiple geographies. Operating across different countries with distinct talent pools meant that a constrained job distribution capability significantly hampered their ability to reach qualified candidates effectively. The combination of manual administrative tasks and limited reach created a bottleneck that consumed valuable HR time and threatened to slow down the company’s ambitious growth trajectory. Poole estimated that during peak hiring periods, this manual chasing alone consumed approximately 20 hours of her week, time that could have been dedicated to more strategic HR initiatives.
The Strategic Shift: Identifying a Modern Solution
When LEAP began evaluating alternative recruitment platforms in 2018, the organization was still operating in a dynamic startup mode, characterized by rapid scaling. Price was a genuine consideration, which naturally ruled out some of the larger, more expensive enterprise platforms. However, the decision to choose a new ATS was not solely an economic one. As a technology company, LEAP sought a recruitment platform that mirrored its own identity: smart, innovative, and genuinely intuitive. The ideal solution needed to be user-friendly, requiring minimal change management to ensure widespread adoption among hiring managers across six countries, many of whom had full-time roles beyond recruitment.
Workable quickly distinguished itself during the evaluation process. Susanne Poole noted that Workable "felt like it had its finger on the pulse. It spoke to what we needed and it was just smart. And Workable has always really delivered on that." The platform’s comprehensive people search functionality and multi-board job distribution capabilities were significant factors, especially given LEAP’s need to recruit across different geographies with distinct talent pools. The ability to manage both UK and US hiring from a single, unified platform, rather than running parallel and disparate systems, was precisely the streamlined solution the organization required to support its global ambitions. This consolidated approach promised not only efficiency but also consistency in candidate experience and recruitment processes across regions.
Seamless Implementation and Rapid Adoption
The transition to Workable across the organization proved to be remarkably straightforward, according to Poole. To facilitate the rollout, she distributed informative learning videos to hiring managers and conducted a small number of focused workshops to bring teams online. The process encountered no significant disruption, a notable achievement for a company that had grown to between 500 and 600 employees at the time. This frictionless adoption was largely attributed to the inherent intuitiveness of the Workable platform.
Poole observed, "People weren’t confused by what we were trying to get out of it. They embraced it quickly. I don’t recall this giving us any hiccups." This rapid and seamless adoption was not accidental; it was a direct outcome of a platform designed to be used effectively by individuals who are not professional recruiters. Hiring managers, often burdened with their own demanding responsibilities, typically have minimal patience for complex software. Workable’s user-centric design met these users where they were, enabling them to quickly integrate the tool into their existing workflows without extensive training or frustration, thus maximizing buy-in and utility from the outset.
Quantifiable Impact: Efficiency, Quality, and Cost Savings
The immediate operational impact of integrating Workable was a dramatic return of time to the HR team. During LEAP’s period of rapid scaling, the previous system’s requirement for constant chasing, reminding, and manual coordination of feedback had consumed an enormous portion of Susanne Poole’s week. With Workable now automating communications, sending pipeline reminders, and providing real-time candidate status updates, this significant administrative overhead largely vanished. Poole estimates that this freed up approximately 20 hours per week in 2018, stating, "Easily about 20 hours a week back in 2018. There was so much chasing because we didn’t have a system that spoke to everyone and kept everyone honest.”
This reclaimed time was strategically redirected toward higher-value work, allowing Poole and her team to focus on critical areas such as enhancing candidate quality, engaging in more strategic hiring conversations, and proactively building a robust talent pipeline. This shift enabled LEAP to significantly reduce its dependence on external recruiters for most role categories, directly impacting their bottom line.
A pivotal outcome of this strategic shift is LEAP’s highly successful internal referral program. Over the past 12 months, a remarkable 100% of LEAP’s US hires have been sourced through internal referrals. This impressive figure is not merely coincidental but reflects a deliberate and refined talent strategy built upon the strength of the organization’s existing workforce and robustly supported by Workable’s dedicated referral functionality. Instead of broadly disseminating job postings and sifting through thousands of applications for operational and support roles, Poole adopted a more considered and targeted approach: leveraging the trusted networks of current employees. "To the point where I don’t even post the role on the job boards at the moment. We took a very deliberate approach to do the referral piece," Poole confirmed. This strategy has proven immensely effective, consistently delivering high-quality, pre-vetted candidates who often possess a deeper understanding of the company culture and values.
The financial implications are substantial. For operational and support roles, Workable has consistently delivered qualified candidates without any need for external recruiter spend, which typically carries high agency fees. This cost efficiency compounds over time, particularly for a company experiencing steady growth across multiple markets. Furthermore, the average time to hire has been reduced to just four weeks, while the average time to fill stands at six weeks. These metrics are indicative of a streamlined, consistent, and predictable hiring cycle, critical for maintaining momentum in a global organization. The ability to manage the full candidate journey—from initial posting to eventual start date—within a single, integrated platform has been instrumental in achieving these consistent outcomes and ensuring global operational consistency.
Enhancing Candidate Experience and Employer Branding
For candidates, the experience of navigating LEAP’s hiring process has markedly improved since the implementation of Workable. Automated messaging ensures that every applicant receives timely, professional communication at each stage, regardless of the ultimate outcome. This reliability is crucial in today’s competitive hiring market, where the candidate experience directly reflects on a company’s brand. LEAP, as an innovative tech company, places a high premium on both.
The self-scheduling feature has emerged as one of Susanne Poole’s most valued tools. This functionality eliminates the cumbersome process of manually coordinating calendars across multiple stakeholders and candidates. Instead, candidates can select an interview time that conveniently fits their schedule. "Self-scheduling is brilliant. It connects your calendar, you push it out to candidates, they pick a time that suits them. It stops so much unnecessary back and forth. It is a huge time saver and it always works," Poole highlighted. This not only accelerates the hiring process but also demonstrates respect for the candidate’s time, contributing positively to LEAP’s employer brand.
Fostering Fairness and Diversity: The Power of Anonymization
One of Workable’s features that Susanne Poole highlights with particular enthusiasm is candidate anonymization. In a company that strategically views diversity as a genuine competitive advantage, the ability to remove identifying information from candidate profiles before they reach hiring managers transcends mere compliance; it represents a strategic organizational choice.
Unconscious bias is an inherent human tendency. Hiring managers, despite their best intentions, can unconsciously gravitate towards candidates who share similar backgrounds, demographics, or characteristics. Anonymization actively disrupts this pattern, ensuring that the initial evaluation by a decision-maker focuses purely on a candidate’s skills, experience, and potential contributions, rather than their apparent identity. "It takes out that unconscious bias thing that we all have, much as we don’t want to have it," Poole explained. "Our diversity is definitely our superpower. By anonymizing candidates, you’re just finding the people that have what you need. It is so smart and it was so easy to set up.” This commitment to structural fairness not only aligns with LEAP’s values but also ensures access to a broader, more diverse talent pool, which is increasingly recognized as a key driver of innovation and business success in the tech sector.
A Partnership Forged in Innovation
What Susanne Poole values as much as any individual feature is Workable’s unwavering commitment to continuous evolution. The platform LEAP adopted in 2018 and the platform they utilize today are meaningfully different, reflecting a constant cycle of innovation. "The innovation that has come out of Workable, I can’t keep up with it. The Workable we had in 2018 is completely different to the Workable we have now, and that is how it should be," Poole remarked.
For a technology company like LEAP, selecting a hiring platform that consistently innovates is not merely a preference; it is a fundamental requirement. The rapidly changing landscape of talent acquisition, coupled with technological advancements, necessitates a vendor that keeps pace with these shifts. LEAP has found such a partner in Workable, and after eight years, the relationship continues to strengthen, positioning LEAP for sustained growth and success in an increasingly competitive global market. This long-standing partnership serves as a compelling case study for other scaling businesses, demonstrating the tangible return on investment and strategic advantages derived from investing in advanced, user-friendly, and continually evolving HR technology.
