Northern New Jersey-based iLABS, a prominent contract manufacturer specializing in personal care and skincare products, has revolutionized its talent acquisition strategy through a two-year partnership with Workable, an industry-leading applicant tracking system (ATS). This strategic shift has enabled the company to move from a reactive, bottlenecked hiring process to a streamlined, highly efficient, and cost-effective operation. The transformation is particularly noteworthy given iLABS’s lean HR team and the diverse, specialized talent needs across its affiliated entities, encompassing roles from chemists and process engineers to IT specialists and finance professionals.
A New Era for Talent Acquisition at iLABS
Before adopting Workable, iLABS’s recruitment function was characterized by reliance on a single in-house recruiter, a lack of robust technological support, and a consequently slow and often reactive approach to filling critical roles. This system proved inadequate for a growing manufacturing operation that consistently requires a wide array of specialized skills. A previous attempt to implement a different ATS, Greenhouse, ended in frustration and failed deployment, highlighting the urgent need for a user-friendly and effective solution.
The introduction of Workable marked a pivotal change. Now, spearheaded by HR Coordinator Francesca Gonzalez, iLABS’s talent acquisition operates with remarkable agility and efficiency. Gonzalez, serving as the primary point of contact for all recruitment across the organization and its affiliates, manages a significant workload—often juggling up to eight concurrent open roles, ranging from entry-level manufacturing positions to complex senior technical searches. This capacity, achieved without additional headcount in the HR department, underscores the profound impact of Workable’s automation and organizational capabilities. The company’s quick results table illustrates these gains succinctly: approximately five hours saved per recruiter per week, enabling a lean HR team to operate at full hiring velocity, attracting over 300 applicants for single roles, filling senior positions within two months, and ensuring every applicant receives timely communication.
Chronology of a Transformation: From Bottleneck to Breakthrough
The journey to iLABS’s current recruitment efficiency can be understood through distinct phases. For years, the company’s talent acquisition lagged behind its operational growth. Recruitment was entirely dependent on one individual, who, despite best efforts, lacked the necessary technological infrastructure and channel diversity to keep pace. This created significant bottlenecks, particularly in an industry where specialized skills are in high demand and competition for talent is fierce. The manufacturing sector, especially in niche areas like personal care and skincare, requires a constant influx of highly skilled professionals, from R&D chemists to quality assurance experts. Without an efficient system, iLABS struggled to compete effectively for these critical roles.
A key turning point was the realization that the existing manual process was unsustainable. The attempt to implement a sophisticated ATS like Greenhouse, while well-intentioned, became a costly and time-consuming endeavor that ultimately failed to deliver. This experience underscored the importance of selecting a platform that was not only powerful but also intuitive and easy to implement for a lean HR team. The failure to leverage external agencies further exacerbated the issue, placing the entire burden of sourcing, screening, and hiring on a single person.
Francesca Gonzalez vividly recalls the challenges: "We had an in-house recruiter and we weren’t utilizing outside agencies either. It was mostly just on this one person, which made things lag a little bit instead of being as fast as we would hope, especially in our industry." This period of reactive, slow hiring meant potential talent was lost, and critical positions remained vacant longer than necessary, impacting productivity and innovation.
The search for a new solution led iLABS to Workable. The criteria were clear: the platform needed to be operable by a small HR team without extensive training, capable of handling a diverse range of roles across multiple corporate entities, and designed for speed and efficiency. Workable met all these requirements. Within two years of implementation, the platform had not only streamlined operations but also enabled the existing HR team to manage a greater volume and complexity of roles at a significantly reduced cost compared to the previous structure.
Unlocking Efficiency: The Power of Workable’s Automation
A cornerstone of iLABS’s success with Workable is the platform’s robust automation features, which have fundamentally reshaped daily operations for Francesca Gonzalez. She estimates that Workable saves her approximately five hours per week, a significant recovery of time previously consumed by manual, administrative tasks. These tasks included drafting and sending individual emails, meticulously copying templates, chasing hiring manager responses, and repeatedly re-entering candidate information—all processes now largely automated. Annually, this translates to over 260 hours of administrative work reclaimed, allowing Gonzalez to dedicate more time to strategic candidate engagement, sourcing, and fostering stronger relationships with hiring managers.
The automation workflows central to this efficiency include stage-based email triggers, which ensure consistent and timely communication with candidates at every step of the hiring pipeline. Self-scheduling links, directly integrated with Gonzalez’s calendar, eliminate the cumbersome back-and-forth typically associated with interview coordination, allowing candidates to book slots that align with her availability. Perhaps most impactful is the automated rejection notification workflow, a system Gonzalez configured herself, ensuring every applicant receives a timely response regardless of the outcome. This commitment to candidate communication, which was not consistently present before Workable, significantly enhances iLABS’s employer brand.
Gonzalez praises these features, stating, "Workable makes my life more streamlined… it is amazing, especially when I’m juggling so many roles at a time." She adds, "I love the automation features. I can just send the email right away. My availability is already set. I don’t have to waste time managing my schedule. It links directly to my calendar." This level of integration and automation is crucial for a lean team operating at high velocity. Industry data suggests that recruiters can spend up to 30% of their time on administrative tasks; Workable has drastically reduced this burden for iLABS, enabling a higher quality of engagement with candidates and internal stakeholders.
Expanding Reach and Refining Sourcing Strategies
Workable has also significantly enhanced iLABS’s ability to attract a broad and qualified pool of candidates. For general roles, the platform’s multi-board distribution capabilities deliver impressive volume. A recent example is a Quality Assurance Supervisor position that attracted over 300 applicants, demonstrating Workable’s reach and effectiveness in disseminating job postings across various channels. For more specialized positions, such as a Food Scientist requiring a nutraceutical background, Workable efficiently surfaces a targeted pool of candidates, ensuring relevance and quality.
To manage this volume effectively, Gonzalez leverages Workable’s filtering tools and automatic disqualification questions. These features are vital for reducing the manual review of unqualified applicants, a common time sink in high-volume recruitment. This is particularly important for iLABS, an on-site company, which often receives applications from individuals outside its immediate geographic region. The ability to quickly identify and filter candidates based on location, experience, and specific qualifications ensures that only the most relevant applications reach the hiring managers.
For senior-level searches that require external agency support, iLABS employs a smart strategy using Workable: creating a duplicate job posting, one public-facing and one internal. This allows for the consolidation of both agency submissions and direct applications into a single, unified system, streamlining candidate management and reducing the risk of duplication or oversight. This approach proved highly effective in a recent Senior Product Manager search, which was successfully filled within a competitive two-month timeframe—a speed often challenging to achieve for specialized senior roles, which can typically take three to six months or longer to fill in the broader market.
Seamless Integrations and Superior Candidate Experience
Among the many features Workable offers, the background check integration stands out as Francesca Gonzalez’s "favorite thing." The ability to initiate background checks, monitor their status, and directly download results into a candidate’s confidential profile eliminates the need for a separate platform, additional logins, and manual data transfer. For a coordinator managing multiple active pipelines simultaneously, this single integration compounds into significant time savings and reduces context switching, allowing for a more focused and efficient workflow. This level of integration not only enhances efficiency but also improves data security and compliance by centralizing sensitive information within a secure ATS.
The impact on candidate experience has been equally profound. Francesca Gonzalez herself applied to iLABS through Workable and remembers the ease of self-scheduling her phone screen without any back-and-forth coordination. This positive personal experience directly informed how she built out the candidate-facing side of iLABS’s recruitment process. Prior to Workable, communication with unsuccessful candidates was inconsistent. Now, thanks to an automated workflow configured by Gonzalez, every applicant who does not advance receives a timely rejection notification at every pipeline stage. This ensures transparency and provides closure for candidates, fostering a positive perception of iLABS as an employer.
"I was able to implement the automation workflow so that any time a candidate got rejected at any stage, they got that email notification pushed out. At least they know. ‘Am I still considered? Am I not?’ That communication is actually happening now," Gonzalez emphasizes. This commitment to candidate communication is a critical differentiator, particularly in today’s competitive talent market, where a positive candidate experience can significantly impact an employer’s reputation and future talent attraction efforts.
Unified Collaboration and Strategic Impact
Workable’s intuitive design has also facilitated widespread adoption among iLABS’s diverse hiring manager cohort, which spans from first-time directors to seasoned executives in their sixties. Regardless of technological proficiency, managers have consistently engaged with the platform, requiring minimal instruction from Gonzalez. This means less time spent on explaining the tool and more time focused on managing the actual recruitment process.
The result is a shared organizational standard for hiring. Rather than re-explaining workflows for each new role, the team operates from a common baseline, with established expectations for both HR and hiring managers. This consistency streamlines decision-making, accelerates feedback loops, and fosters a more collaborative hiring environment. Gonzalez confidently states, "I am fairly confident it’s probably one of the best ATS systems out there. I speak so highly of it every time I talk to my hiring managers." This high level of internal satisfaction is a testament to Workable’s user-centric design and effectiveness.
Business Impact and Strategic Advantage
Two years into their partnership with Workable, iLABS has achieved a recruitment function that is measurably faster, better organized, and significantly more cost-effective than anything the previous structure supported. A single HR coordinator, Francesca Gonzalez, now efficiently manages up to eight open roles simultaneously, recovers approximately five hours per week through automation, and delivers a candidate experience that rivals organizations with much larger recruiting teams.
The most significant return on investment, in Gonzalez’s assessment and that of iLABS leadership, is the elimination of the dedicated in-house recruiter position. The work previously performed by this individual has been seamlessly absorbed by the existing HR team, supported by Workable, without any decline in output or quality. Based on average recruiter salaries in the Northern New Jersey area, this represents a substantial annual cost saving, potentially exceeding $70,000-$100,000 in salary and benefits. This financial saving, coupled with increased efficiency, translates directly into a healthier bottom line for iLABS.
For a growing contract manufacturer like iLABS, which operates in a competitive industry and vies for specialized talent in a densely populated regional market, this is not merely an operational improvement; it is a structural and strategic advantage. The ability to maintain hiring velocity, quickly fill specialized and hard-to-fill positions, and provide a consistently positive candidate experience positions iLABS favorably against competitors.
Implications for the Future and Industry Outlook
The success story of iLABS and Workable serves as a compelling case study for other mid-sized manufacturing companies grappling with similar talent acquisition challenges. It demonstrates that with the right technology, lean HR teams can achieve exceptional results, optimize resources, and drive significant business impact. The ability to scale hiring operations without escalating headcount costs is a critical factor for growth-oriented companies in today’s economic climate.
Looking ahead, iLABS is well-positioned for continued growth. Workable provides a scalable foundation for their talent strategy, allowing them to adapt to fluctuating hiring demands and maintain their competitive edge. The ongoing optimization of workflows and the continuous leverage of Workable’s features will likely yield further efficiencies and enhancements in their recruitment process. The partnership between iLABS and Workable exemplifies a modern approach to talent acquisition, where technology empowers human resources to be a strategic driver of organizational success, transforming recruitment from a reactive necessity into a proactive competitive advantage.
