LEAP Legal Software, a global leader in cloud-based legal practice management solutions, has announced significant advancements in its human resources and talent acquisition strategies, attributing a substantial portion of these successes to its eight-year partnership with the applicant tracking system (ATS) provider, Workable. Through strategic implementation and consistent utilization of Workable’s innovative features, LEAP has not only streamlined its hiring processes but has also cultivated a robust, high-quality talent pipeline, yielding impressive metrics such as 100% internal referrals for US hires over the past year and an estimated 20 hours saved weekly in HR administrative tasks during peak hiring periods. This transformative shift underscores the critical role of advanced HR technology in enabling lean HR teams to operate at scale across diverse international markets.
LEAP Legal Software: A Global Powerhouse for Small Law Firms
Founded over three decades ago in Australia, LEAP Legal Software has evolved from its humble beginnings into a formidable global enterprise, dedicated to empowering small law firms with cutting-edge cloud-based practice management solutions. Its comprehensive platform helps legal professionals manage cases, clients, and administrative tasks more efficiently, allowing them to focus on delivering exceptional legal services. The company’s expansion has been strategic and rapid, establishing strong footholds with offices across Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This international presence now supports approximately 900 employees worldwide, reflecting a sustained period of growth that has naturally placed considerable demands on its human resources infrastructure.
The US operations of LEAP, which primarily encompass critical support, sales, client success, and implementation roles, are overseen by Susanne Poole. As the driving force behind all aspects of people, recruitment, and culture for the US arm, Poole’s role is expansive and demanding. Her journey, much like many HR leaders in fast-growing technology companies, has seen her frequently operate as a "team of one," juggling the multifaceted responsibilities of keeping the hiring engine running while simultaneously nurturing company culture and managing employee relations. This context highlights the intense pressure on HR professionals to find efficient, scalable solutions that can adapt to rapid organizational expansion without compromising quality or strategic focus.
The Pre-Workable Era: Navigating Recruitment in the Fast Lane
Before the integration of Workable in December 2018, LEAP’s recruitment efforts were managed through a module embedded within its existing Human Resources Information System (HRIS). While technically functional, this system presented numerous operational challenges and created significant friction at nearly every stage of the hiring pipeline. The interface was described as clunky and unintuitive, failing to meet the agility required by a rapidly scaling tech company.
A primary pain point was the system’s inability to automate communications to hiring managers. This critical deficiency meant that Susanne Poole, as the sole HR professional for the US arm, was burdened with the laborious task of manually tracking down stakeholders, repeatedly following up, and reminding them of pending candidate feedback or progress updates. For an HR leader managing a rapidly growing organization, this administrative overhead was not merely inefficient; it was unsustainable, diverting valuable time and resources from strategic initiatives to mundane, repetitive tasks. The manual chasing became a significant drain, impeding timely decision-making and slowing down the overall hiring velocity.
Furthermore, the existing system’s limitations extended to job board access. It lacked the capability to distribute job postings at the volume or breadth necessary for a burgeoning technology company seeking diverse talent pools. For an organization like LEAP, operating across multiple countries with distinct labor markets and talent demands, this constraint was particularly acute, hindering its ability to reach qualified candidates efficiently on a global scale. Susanne Poole articulated this challenge succinctly, stating, "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. We struggled with our previous system in doing that." This sentiment underscored the urgent need for a more dynamic and responsive recruitment platform.
The Strategic Pivot: Why Workable Stood Out
The search for an alternative began in 2018, a period when LEAP was still very much in its startup phase, albeit experiencing rapid expansion. Cost-effectiveness was a genuine consideration, which naturally excluded some of the larger, more expensive enterprise-level platforms from their evaluation. However, the decision to adopt Workable was not solely driven by economic factors.
As a technology company, LEAP sought a hiring platform that mirrored its own identity: smart, innovative, and inherently intuitive. Susanne Poole recognized that any new system would need to be easily adopted by hiring managers across six countries, many of whom were not HR specialists and had limited patience for complex software or extensive training. The platform needed to integrate seamlessly into their daily workflows rather than imposing a steep learning curve.
Workable quickly distinguished itself during the initial demonstrations. Its user-friendly interface, robust feature set, and forward-thinking approach resonated deeply with LEAP’s requirements. "Workable felt like it had its finger on the pulse," Poole recalled. "It spoke to what we needed and it was just smart. And Workable has always really delivered on that." Key functionalities such as advanced people search capabilities and multi-board job distribution were particularly appealing, given LEAP’s imperative to recruit across different geographies with distinct talent pools. The prospect of managing both UK and US hiring from a single, unified platform, rather than maintaining parallel, disparate systems, offered the exact solution the organization desperately needed to streamline its international talent acquisition efforts.
A Seamless Transition: Implementation and Rapid Adoption
The implementation of Workable across LEAP’s global operations was, in Susanne Poole’s words, "remarkably straightforward." This ease of integration is a testament to Workable’s intuitive design, which significantly minimizes the typical challenges associated with new software rollouts. To facilitate adoption, Poole distributed concise learning videos to hiring managers and conducted a small number of focused workshops to bring teams online. Crucially, the process unfolded with no significant disruption to ongoing operations. For a company of 500 to 600 employees at the time, achieving such a frictionless rollout is a notable accomplishment, often challenging to replicate with less intuitive platforms.
The high rate of early adoption was not coincidental; it was a direct consequence of Workable being specifically designed for a broad user base, including hiring managers who are not professional recruiters. These individuals, already juggling full workloads, require software that is easy to understand and use, demanding minimal training. Workable met them precisely where they were, providing a platform that allowed them to engage effectively with the recruitment process without becoming bogged down in technical complexities. Poole noted, "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 acceptance underscored the platform’s user-centric design and its immediate value proposition to non-HR stakeholders.
Quantifiable Impact: Time Savings and Operational Efficiency
The most immediate and profound operational impact of LEAP’s transition to Workable was a dramatic recapture of time. During LEAP’s period of rapid scaling in 2018, the previous system’s inefficiencies had forced Susanne Poole to spend an inordinate amount of her week on manual chasing, reminding, and coordinating candidate feedback. This administrative burden was consuming vast quantities of her professional hours, hindering her ability to focus on more strategic HR initiatives.
With Workable’s robust automation capabilities, including automated communications, pipeline reminders, and real-time candidate status updates, this overhead largely vanished. Poole reported an astonishing return of "easily about 20 hours a week back in 2018." This substantial time saving freed her from the relentless cycle of manual follow-ups, allowing her to redirect her energy toward higher-value activities such as enhancing candidate quality, engaging in strategic hiring conversations with leadership, and proactively building a robust talent pipeline. The elimination of manual administrative drag enabled LEAP’s lean HR team to operate with unprecedented efficiency and at a scale previously unimaginable, directly contributing to the company’s sustained growth.
A Referral Strategy That Redefines Talent Acquisition
Perhaps one of the most compelling outcomes of the Workable partnership is the transformation of LEAP’s talent acquisition strategy, particularly concerning internal referrals. Over the past 12 months, an extraordinary 100% of LEAP’s US hires have been sourced through internal referrals. This remarkable figure is not a mere coincidence but the direct result of a deliberate and highly effective talent strategy, built upon the strengths of the organization’s existing employee base and powerfully supported by Workable’s integrated referral functionality.
Rather than adopting a broad-brush approach of flooding job boards with postings and sifting through thousands of applications, especially for operational and support roles, Susanne Poole has championed a considered and targeted approach: leveraging the trusted networks of current employees. By using Workable to efficiently manage the referral pipeline, LEAP has been able to consistently attract high-quality candidates who come pre-vetted and recommended by individuals who already understand and thrive within the organization’s culture. "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 revealed.
This strategy offers significant advantages beyond just candidate quality. For operational and support roles, Workable has consistently delivered qualified candidates without any reliance on external recruitment agencies. This elimination of external recruiter spend represents a substantial cost efficiency that compounds over time, particularly for a company experiencing steady growth across multiple competitive markets. The average cost of an agency placement can range from 15-30% of an annual salary, so this direct saving is a significant boost to the company’s bottom line, allowing resources to be reallocated to other strategic areas.
Elevating the Candidate Experience Through Reliability
The implementation of Workable has also profoundly improved the candidate experience throughout LEAP’s hiring process. In today’s competitive talent landscape, a positive candidate experience is not merely a courtesy; it is a critical component of employer branding and an essential tool for attracting and retaining top talent. Workable’s automated messaging ensures that no applicant falls through the cracks, regardless of the outcome of their application. Every candidate receives timely, professional responses at each stage of the process, fostering a sense of respect and transparency. This reliability matters immensely, as a smooth, respectful hiring journey reflects positively on LEAP’s brand as an employer.
One of Susanne Poole’s favorite features, the self-scheduling tool, exemplifies this commitment to a superior candidate experience. Instead of the cumbersome and time-consuming manual coordination of calendars across multiple stakeholders and time zones, candidates are empowered to select interview times that best suit their availability. This feature eradicates the frustrating back-and-forth email exchanges, significantly accelerates the scheduling process, and, crucially, demonstrates a respect for the candidate’s time. "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 enthusiastically stated, highlighting its dual benefits of efficiency and enhanced candidate perception.
Championing Structural Fairness: The Power of Anonymization
Beyond efficiency and experience, Workable’s features have also enabled LEAP to advance its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I). Susanne Poole highlights the candidate anonymization feature with particular enthusiasm. For a company that genuinely views diversity as a competitive advantage, the ability to remove identifying information from candidate profiles before they reach hiring managers is not merely a compliance exercise; it is a profound strategic choice aimed at fostering a more equitable hiring process.
Unconscious bias is a pervasive human tendency. Hiring managers, despite their best intentions, can unconsciously gravitate toward candidates who share similar backgrounds, demographics, or characteristics. Anonymization directly disrupts this pattern by ensuring that the initial evaluation focuses solely on a candidate’s qualifications, skills, and experience, rather than superficial identifiers such as name, gender, or ethnicity. This approach helps to mitigate inherent biases, promoting a merit-based assessment from the outset. Poole firmly believes, "It takes out that unconscious bias thing that we all have, much as we don’t want to have it. 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 feature underscores LEAP’s proactive stance on building a diverse workforce through structural fairness.
Eight Years of Innovation: A Partnership for the Future
What Susanne Poole values as much as any individual feature is Workable’s unwavering commitment to continuous innovation. The platform she initially adopted in 2018 is meaningfully different from the version she utilizes today, having evolved consistently in all the right ways. This ongoing development ensures that Workable remains at the forefront of HR technology, adapting to new market demands and user needs. "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 commented, acknowledging the dynamic nature of effective software development.
For a technology company like LEAP, choosing a hiring platform that demonstrates continuous innovation is not merely a preference; it is an absolute requirement. The tech landscape is constantly evolving, and a static recruitment tool would quickly become obsolete, hindering LEAP’s ability to attract and secure top talent. In Workable, LEAP has found a partner that not only understands but actively anticipates the future needs of modern HR and talent acquisition. After an impressive eight years, the enduring relationship between LEAP Legal Software and Workable shows no signs of faltering, serving as a testament to the platform’s sustained value, adaptability, and critical role in LEAP’s global success. This partnership exemplifies how strategic HR technology adoption can empower organizations to scale efficiently, enhance candidate experiences, foster diversity, and maintain a competitive edge in the global talent market.
