The Saskatchewan Roughriders, a venerable and community-owned franchise in the Canadian Football League (CFL) and the reigning 2025 Grey Cup champions, have fundamentally transformed their talent acquisition and people operations through the strategic implementation of Workable’s comprehensive hiring platform. This pivotal shift has not only streamlined recruitment for one of Canada’s most beloved sports organizations but also established new benchmarks for efficiency, candidate experience, and strategic HR reporting within the professional sports landscape, driven by the pioneering vision of Director of Talent Management and People Operations, Kim Gallagher.
A Legacy of Community and Ambition
The Saskatchewan Roughriders stand as a unique institution in professional sports. Unlike most teams globally, the Roughriders are community-owned, a distinction that imbues their connection with the province of Saskatchewan with profound cultural and structural significance. In a province with a population of just over one million people, the team’s immense popularity is underscored by its financial success; following their 2025 Grey Cup triumph, the organization generated an astonishing $13 million in merchandise revenue alone. This figure is a testament to the extraordinary loyalty and passionate engagement of their fan base, which extends far beyond Saskatchewan’s geographical borders.
At the helm of the club’s vital people operations is Kim Gallagher, a figure of considerable influence within the organization and the broader CFL. With an impressive 15-year tenure at the Roughriders, Gallagher holds the distinction of being the first dedicated HR professional in the history of the CFL. Leading a lean two-person team, she oversees a vast array of human resources functions, spanning from executive-level hiring to the meticulous management of an extensive annual internship program. Her role demands an operational precision commensurate with the dynamic and high-stakes environment of professional sports. The organization maintains approximately 80 salaried, year-round staff members, a figure that expands significantly to include roughly 100 additional hourly roles during the demanding football season. These positions encompass a diverse range of departments, including accounting, marketing, creative services, and digital production, with the high-volume annual internship program adding a substantial layer of recruitment complexity.
Navigating the Pre-Workable Landscape: Challenges of a Growing Organization
Prior to adopting Workable, the Roughriders’ recruitment efforts were managed through Teamworks Online for two years, following an earlier era characterized by ad-hoc, inbox-based hiring. While Teamworks Online offered a basic level of functionality, it invariably introduced significant friction into nearly every stage of the hiring process, proving increasingly inadequate for a growing and ambitious organization.
"It felt really chunky," Gallagher recalled, reflecting on the previous system. "It was tough to manage the process, and it was particularly challenging for our hiring managers to utilize and visualize where things stood." For a small HR team supporting an expanding organization, these systemic inefficiencies carried tangible consequences. The laborious task of posting open roles across multiple distinct job boards, including specialized provincial platforms like SAS Jobs, demanded considerable manual effort on each individual platform. This fragmented approach represented a significant time cost that compounded rapidly for a team comprising only one or two dedicated HR professionals. Furthermore, the absence of a clear, visual candidate pipeline made it exceedingly difficult to track the precise stage of each applicant or to ensure that hiring managers were maintaining an appropriate pace in their evaluations. The Roughriders recognized an urgent need for a talent acquisition solution specifically designed to align with their operational ethos: lean, agile, and sufficiently intuitive that it could be seamlessly adopted by a hiring manager without requiring extensive, time-consuming tutorials.
The Strategic Imperative: Why Workable Became the Solution
The decision to transition to Workable emerged from strategic conversations at the league level, which prompted Kim Gallagher to thoroughly explore the platform’s capabilities. What she discovered was a solution perfectly tailored to the organization’s scale and operational requirements, without the prohibitive overhead and superfluous features often associated with larger, enterprise-level systems.
"With being a small organization, it was tough to find a system that matched our size as opposed to implementing a massive program with all the bells and whistles we weren’t even going to utilize," Gallagher explained. This discernment was crucial for an organization that prioritized efficiency and relevance. Two key features ultimately sealed the decision for Workable. Firstly, the highly intuitive visual pipeline provided a dramatic upgrade from their previous experience. The ability to clearly see candidates progressing through well-defined stages offered unprecedented transparency and control over the recruitment funnel. Secondly, the multi-board job posting capability addressed a critical pain point. For a small team, the sheer volume of time required to manually post roles across every relevant job board, including Saskatchewan-specific platforms, was substantial. Workable consolidated this arduous process into a single, efficient action, liberating valuable HR time. "The time it takes to go to each one of those boards as a one-to-two person team is massive. Being able to spread our ad as far as possible from one place was a big decision maker," Gallagher affirmed, underscoring the strategic importance of this efficiency gain.
Seamless Transition and Rapid Adoption
The implementation of Workable at the Saskatchewan Roughriders was, in Kim Gallagher’s succinct assessment, "like flipping a switch." She recalled the process as remarkably smooth, highlighting the minimal disruption experienced by the organization. The primary concern ahead of the rollout was ensuring seamless integration with the Roughriders’ existing website, a critical component for directing candidates effortlessly into the new hiring pipeline. This transition was executed without any perceptible hitches. The old system was maintained briefly to finalize existing postings, while all new roles were launched exclusively through Workable from day one, ensuring a clean and efficient cutover.
What particularly impressed Gallagher was the negligible amount of onboarding required for the new system. The platform’s inherent user-friendliness meant that hiring managers could navigate it independently, quickly becoming proficient without extensive training. "It was so user-friendly that you could just figure it out. Everything was right there on the screen," she noted, emphasizing the intuitive design. This ease of adoption was strikingly demonstrated when even the CEO, serving as a hiring manager for a recent executive search, required no additional instruction. They were simply added to the job, granted access to the platform, and participated fully in the recruitment process without needing any direct support or guidance from the HR team – a testament to Workable’s accessible design and a significant validation of its efficacy.
Elevating Evaluation and Fostering Collaboration
With Workable firmly established, the Roughriders were able to standardize their candidate evaluation process in ways that were previously unattainable. Scorecards have now been universally adopted across all hiring searches, with hiring managers consistently required to score every candidate. A recent, impactful upgrade—the transition from a rudimentary "thumbs up/thumbs down" system to a nuanced five-star rating scale, a suggestion championed by their Workable account executive, Nick—yielded an immediate and profound positive difference. "Life-changing," Gallagher declared. "Sometimes you’re just not quite sure. Our hiring managers loved having that nuance." This enhanced granularity in evaluation fostered more consistent, objective, and insightful assessments of candidates.
The platform’s AI screening capability quickly emerged as another invaluable tool, particularly during periods of exceptionally high application volume, such as the surge experienced after the Grey Cup victory. "I would sort by match percentage and start with the 100% ones first – almost like a warm lead," Gallagher explained. "I got through all the applicants, but when you’re tight for time and the volume is that high, it helps to know where to start." This intelligent prioritization allowed the small HR team to efficiently manage a significant influx of applications, ensuring top matches were identified swiftly without any candidate being overlooked.
Customized application questions further added a critical layer of precision to the screening process. The team strategically utilizes these questions to clarify essential criteria, such as work authorization for Canadian roles, a meaningful filter given the frequent misconception among applicants that a U.S. passport confers the right to work in Canada. Questions are also employed to request portfolio links for creative roles or, in one of the more distinctive use cases within their hiring pipeline, to solicit audition tape links from prospective mascot candidates. These targeted questions serve a dual purpose: they provide valuable, specific information and act as a reliable indicator of candidate seriousness. "We don’t use questions to screen people out," Gallagher clarified, "but they tell us a lot about who’s serious and who’s mass applying." This approach ensures a more focused and qualified candidate pool.
Strategic Reporting: Earning a Seat at the Executive Table
One of the most significant operational transformations since the implementation of Workable has been Kim Gallagher’s enhanced ability to quantify and articulate the tangible impact of her team’s work to executive leadership. This newfound capacity has elevated the strategic importance of the HR function within the organization.
"The reporting is so easy. You click and the stuff shows up," Gallagher enthused. "What I like is that it’s already prepopulated – you don’t have to build it from scratch or risk selecting one wrong criterion and getting an empty report." This ease of access to robust, pre-configured data empowers the HR team to generate insightful reports quickly and accurately, providing clear metrics on recruitment performance. The candidate pipeline report, in particular, has become a favored tool, offering a comprehensive overview of total interviews conducted, messages exchanged with candidates, and overall pipeline movement over specific periods. When Gallagher compiled this data earlier in the year, it revealed that over 900 messages had been exchanged with candidates within a defined timeframe. This compelling figure effectively communicates the significant volume of work and the meticulous care invested by the HR team, presenting their efforts in terms that executive leadership can immediately understand and appreciate.
The Roughriders’ acclaimed internship program has especially benefited from this heightened visibility. The program is built upon a profound social mission: to address the paradox that students often struggle to gain experience without a job, and cannot secure a job without prior experience. Workable’s advanced reporting capabilities allow Kim Gallagher to meticulously document not only the number of interns hired but also, crucially, how many students received the invaluable experience of an interview with a professional sports organization. This metric goes beyond mere hiring numbers, effectively capturing the full scope of the program’s community impact and its dedication to fostering future talent. "We like to do as many interviews as we can," Gallagher stated. "Even though we can only hire so many students, being interviewed by the Roughriders – that itself is something." This data provides irrefutable evidence of the program’s success and its broader contribution to youth development, solidifying its value to executive leadership and the wider community.
Unwavering Reliability and Enhanced Candidate Experience
The Roughriders have made a deliberate and strategic choice to conduct every stage of the candidate journey through Workable, from the initial outreach and interview scheduling to the final offer letters and beyond. This consistent reliance on a single platform is not incidental; it is a direct consequence of the platform’s demonstrated reliability and its positive impact on the candidate experience.
This inherent trust in Workable’s deliverability has profoundly shaped the team’s operational procedures. Recently, when a hiring manager expressed a desire to meet two candidates for an informal coffee, Kim Gallagher instinctively routed the outreach through Workable rather than resorting to a personal email. This decision underscores the paramount importance of maintaining all communication within a centralized system, not only for internal organizational efficiency but also for the candidates themselves. "When I make an offer and tell a candidate it will come through Workable, you can hear the relief," Gallagher shared. "They know the message is going to arrive. It gives them peace of mind." This reliability fosters a sense of professionalism and transparency, crucial elements in attracting and securing top talent in a competitive market.
The Mobile App: Recruitment Without Boundaries
As the Saskatchewan Roughriders navigate one of their busiest hiring periods in a decade, Kim Gallagher has increasingly relied on Workable’s robust mobile application to maintain her demanding pace, often managing two distinct roles simultaneously. "We have more jobs open right now than I’ve seen in 10 years," Gallagher noted. "The mobile app is allowing me to keep up. It gives me a lot of flexibility and I can work from anywhere." This unparalleled flexibility is a game-changer for a small HR team, enabling them to remain agile and responsive regardless of their physical location.
The mobile app’s accessibility to saved templates means that critical candidate follow-ups, which might otherwise be delayed until the next morning, can be sent in real-time, maintaining momentum in the hiring process. For high-volume intern interviews, the self-scheduling feature, complete with built-in buffer time between calls, has become an indispensable tool. This functionality allows the team to manage a large number of interview slots efficiently without compromising the quality or individual attention given to each conversation. The ability to conduct full recruiting activities via a mobile device ensures that recruiting continuity is maintained from anywhere, at any time, providing a critical strategic advantage in talent acquisition.
A Resounding Endorsement for Workable
Without hesitation, the Saskatchewan Roughriders unequivocally recommend Workable. For professional sports organizations, which often grapple with the inherent complexities of year-round operations alongside the high-volume demands of seasonal and internship hiring, Workable offers a rare and potent combination: a platform robust enough to scale seamlessly with organizational growth, yet simultaneously intuitive enough that anyone—from a first-time intern manager to a CEO stepping in as a hiring manager—can utilize it effectively from day one.
For Kim Gallagher, who has dedicated 15 years to meticulously building and refining the HR infrastructure at the Roughriders and has pioneered the very function of professional HR across the entire Canadian Football League, this unique blend of power and simplicity is not merely a desirable feature. It is, fundamentally, the bedrock upon which all other strategic HR initiatives and organizational successes are built. Workable has proven to be an indispensable partner in the Roughriders’ ongoing commitment to excellence, both on and off the field.
