In a significant overhaul of its talent acquisition strategy, iLABS, a leading contract manufacturer specializing in personal care and skincare products, has leveraged the Workable applicant tracking system (ATS) to dramatically enhance recruiter efficiency, expand hiring capacity, and elevate the candidate experience. This strategic shift has not only streamlined operations but also delivered substantial cost savings and positioned the Northern New Jersey-based company with a crucial structural advantage in a competitive talent market. The impact has been immediate and measurable. Recruiter efficiency has surged, with approximately five hours saved per week through automation, freeing up valuable time for more direct candidate engagement. The lean HR team now operates at full hiring velocity, managing multiple concurrent open roles without needing additional headcount. Application reach has expanded significantly, evidenced by over 300 applicants for a single role through multi-board distribution, ensuring a high volume of quality candidates for both general and specialized positions. Furthermore, the speed to fill critical roles has improved, with a senior-level position successfully secured within two months—a testament to competitive placement speed even for hard-to-fill specializations. Crucially, the candidate experience has been meticulously refined, with automated rejection notifications ensuring every applicant receives a timely response, fostering a positive brand image regardless of the outcome.
iLABS: A Leader in Contract Manufacturing with Diverse Talent Needs
Based in Northern New Jersey, iLABS stands as a prominent entity within a cluster of affiliated companies, collectively employing approximately 170 individuals. The company’s core business revolves around contract manufacturing for the personal care and skincare industry, producing a wide array of products including cleansers, sun protection factors (SPFs), and moisturizers. This specialized field necessitates a highly diverse and skilled workforce, ranging from scientific and technical experts to operational and administrative professionals.
The recruitment landscape at iLABS is uniquely broad, encompassing a demanding spectrum of disciplines. The company routinely seeks compounders, chemists, and process engineers—roles critical to product development and manufacturing. Alongside these, there is a consistent need for quality assurance professionals, who uphold stringent industry standards, as well as specialized IT talent, including UI/UX designers and IT specialists, essential for modernizing internal systems and digital interfaces. Finance professionals are also a key component, ensuring the robust financial health of the multi-entity organization. This simultaneous demand across such varied and often highly specialized fields presents a complex challenge for any talent acquisition function, particularly for a company of iLABS’ size navigating a competitive regional market.
Francesca Gonzalez, in her pivotal role as HR Coordinator, serves as the primary architect and executor of all recruiting efforts across the entire organization. She is supported by two HR colleagues who provide assistance during periods of peak demand, highlighting the lean nature of the team responsible for talent acquisition. iLABS’ journey with Workable spans approximately two years, a period that has seen a profound transformation in how the company identifies, attracts, and integrates new talent.
The Pre-Workable Era: Navigating Recruitment Challenges in a Growing Enterprise
Prior to its adoption of Workable, iLABS’ talent acquisition operations faced significant structural and procedural limitations. The company relied heavily on a single, dedicated in-house recruiter to manage all aspects of talent attraction. This approach, while seemingly straightforward, proved to be inherently slow, largely reactive, and lacked the foundational technological support necessary to keep pace with the demands of a rapidly evolving manufacturing operation. The absence of a robust applicant tracking system meant that processes were predominantly manual, leading to bottlenecks and an inability to scale recruitment efforts effectively.
A telling illustration of these challenges was a prolonged and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to implement Greenhouse, a well-known enterprise-level ATS. The implementation process consumed nearly the entire duration of the software contract, with the system only becoming operational just as the contract expired. This experience underscored the difficulties mid-sized organizations often face when attempting to integrate complex, resource-intensive software without adequate internal support or specialized expertise. Such a lengthy and unproductive implementation not only represented a significant financial outlay but also diverted valuable HR resources, further delaying the modernization of the recruiting function.
During this period, iLABS was also not leveraging external recruitment agencies to supplement its talent pipeline. This placed the entire burden of hiring on the shoulders of one individual, who lacked both the advanced tools and the channel diversity required to source talent efficiently across the company’s wide range of specialized roles. The consequence was a talent acquisition process that frequently lagged behind operational needs, especially critical in the fast-paced manufacturing sector where delays in hiring can directly impact production schedules, innovation cycles, and ultimately, market competitiveness.
As Francesca Gonzalez aptly observed regarding the pre-Workable landscape, "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 sentiment encapsulates the frustration and inefficiency that characterized iLABS’ hiring before its strategic pivot. The inability to quickly fill essential roles, particularly specialized ones like chemists or process engineers, could lead to increased workloads for existing staff, missed production targets, or a slowdown in product development, all of which carry significant financial implications for a contract manufacturer. The need for a nimble, efficient, and scalable solution became unequivocally clear.
The Strategic Imperative: Why Workable Became the Solution
The experience with the previous ATS implementation, coupled with the inherent limitations of a manual, single-person recruitment model, solidified iLABS’ understanding of what was truly needed in a talent acquisition platform. The company sought a solution that was not only powerful but also intuitively designed, enabling a lean HR team to operate it effectively without extensive, time-consuming training. Given the broad array of roles—from entry-level manufacturing to highly specialized technical and executive positions—and the complexity of managing hiring across multiple affiliated entities, the platform also needed to be highly versatile. Above all, speed was a critical criterion; iLABS needed to accelerate its hiring process to keep pace with business growth and market demands.
Workable emerged as the clear frontrunner, meticulously addressing all three of these core requirements. Its reputation for user-friendliness and comprehensive, out-of-the-box functionality made it an attractive option for an HR team that couldn’t afford a repeat of the prolonged and costly implementation experienced with a more complex system. Two years into their partnership, Workable has not only met these initial expectations but has demonstrably exceeded them. The same lean HR team, spearheaded by Francesca Gonzalez, is now proficiently managing a significantly higher volume of roles, a greater number of candidates, and a far more intricate recruitment landscape than the previous structure could ever support. This remarkable scalability has been achieved at a fraction of the cost associated with maintaining a dedicated in-house recruiter and the substantial investment in a complex, underutilized enterprise system.
This strategic choice reflects a broader trend in HR technology, where mid-market companies are increasingly seeking solutions that offer enterprise-level capabilities packaged in an accessible, user-friendly format. The emphasis is on immediate utility, rapid deployment, and measurable return on investment, rather than prolonged customization and extensive training requirements. For iLABS, Workable represented not just a software purchase, but a fundamental shift towards a modern, agile, and cost-effective talent acquisition paradigm.
Workable’s Transformative Impact on iLABS’ Hiring Landscape
The implementation of Workable has fundamentally reshaped every aspect of iLABS’ talent acquisition process, turning what was once a bottleneck into a strategic advantage. The following pillars illustrate the profound changes experienced by the organization:
1. Unleashing Hiring Capacity and Agile Role Management
At the heart of iLABS’ revitalized recruitment function is Francesca Gonzalez’s ability to manage an impressive workload with unprecedented ease. She single-handedly oversees the full recruiting lifecycle for iLABS and its affiliated companies. At peak operational capacity, Gonzalez has competently managed as many as eight concurrent open roles, spanning the entire organizational hierarchy—from entry-level manufacturing positions to highly technical senior searches and everything in between. Crucially, she does not perceive this demanding workload as overwhelming, a stark contrast to the previous era.
The key to this enhanced capacity lies in Workable’s intelligent distribution and automation of coordination tasks, which would otherwise consume an exorbitant amount of Gonzalez’s time. Once a new role receives internal approval, it is seamlessly launched on the Workable platform. Gonzalez then efficiently onboards the relevant hiring manager, providing a brief orientation tailored to their specific schedule and preferred level of involvement. This flexibility is vital: some managers engage daily, meticulously reviewing candidates and providing real-time comments directly within the platform, while others prefer to check in on Gonzalez’s consolidated notes as needed. Workable adeptly accommodates both styles, eliminating the need for manual differentiation and complex communication management by the HR coordinator. This adaptability empowers hiring managers to participate in the process in a way that aligns with their own workflows, fostering greater collaboration and ownership.
Gonzalez emphasizes the platform’s impact, stating, "Workable makes my life more streamlined… it is amazing, especially when I’m juggling so many roles at a time." This ability to effortlessly juggle multiple, diverse roles is a direct consequence of Workable’s intuitive design and powerful automation features, enabling iLABS to maintain a lean HR team while achieving high hiring velocity across its complex organizational structure.
2. Driving Recruiter Efficiency Through Intelligent Automation
Recruiting constitutes approximately 70 percent of Francesca Gonzalez’s working day, underscoring the critical importance of efficiency gains. Workable delivers these gains not marginally, but substantially. Gonzalez estimates that the platform saves her approximately five hours per week—a full half-day of productive work recovered from tasks that previously demanded laborious manual effort. These previously manual tasks included drafting and sending individual emails, meticulously copying templates for various communications, persistently tracking down hiring manager responses, and tediously re-entering candidate information across disparate systems.
The automation workflows are
