The Saskatchewan Roughriders, a venerable institution within the Canadian Football League (CFL) and the reigning 2025 Grey Cup champions, have fundamentally transformed their talent acquisition and people operations through a strategic partnership with Workable. This collaboration has yielded rapid and significant results, bolstering candidate volume, standardizing evaluation processes, ensuring communication reliability, and providing unparalleled mobile flexibility for their lean HR team. These improvements are not merely operational enhancements; they represent a strategic evolution for an organization deeply rooted in its community and committed to excellence on and off the field.
A Storied Franchise with Deep Community Roots
The Saskatchewan Roughriders stand apart in the landscape of professional sports. Unlike many of their counterparts, the Roughriders are a community-owned franchise, a unique structure that intrinsically links their identity and success to the province of Saskatchewan. This model fosters an extraordinary level of fan loyalty and engagement, extending far beyond the province’s one million residents. The immediate aftermath of their 2025 Grey Cup victory underscored this profound connection, with the organization generating a staggering $13 million in merchandise revenue alone—a testament to the unwavering devotion of their fan base. This community-centric ethos permeates every aspect of the organization, including its approach to talent.
At the helm of the Roughriders’ people operations is Kim Gallagher, the Director of Talent Management and People Operations. Gallagher holds a pioneering distinction as the first dedicated HR professional in the entire history of the CFL, bringing 15 years of invaluable experience within the organization. With a lean team of just two individuals, she oversees the full spectrum of human resources, from executive recruitment to the meticulous management of a high-volume annual internship program. The organization maintains approximately 80 salaried, year-round staff, a number that swells by roughly 100 additional hourly roles during the football season. These positions span a diverse range of functions, including accounting, marketing, creative design, and digital production, with the internship program introducing a significant layer of high-volume recruiting each year. Managing such a dynamic and varied workforce demands operational precision and efficient systems.
Navigating the Pre-Workable Landscape: Challenges and Inefficiencies
Prior to integrating Workable, the Saskatchewan Roughriders managed their recruiting efforts through Teamworks Online for two years, following an even earlier period of largely inbox-based hiring. While Teamworks Online offered basic functionality, it quickly became a source of considerable friction across nearly every stage of the recruitment process. As Kim Gallagher candidly described, the system "felt really chunky. It was tough to manage the process, and it was particularly challenging for our hiring managers to utilize and visualize where things stood."
This friction carried tangible consequences for a small HR team supporting a growing and high-profile organization. The simple act of posting job roles across multiple external job boards, a necessary step to attract a broad talent pool, demanded arduous manual effort on each platform individually. This repetitive task compounded quickly, consuming valuable time for a team of only one or two people. Furthermore, the absence of a clear, visual hiring pipeline made it exceedingly difficult to track the precise status of candidates or to ensure that hiring managers were actively engaging with the process and keeping pace with recruitment timelines. Such inefficiencies could lead to delays in filling critical roles, a disjointed candidate experience, and a potential loss of top talent. The Roughriders recognized an urgent need for a solution that was purpose-built for their operational reality: lean, fast, and intuitively designed enough to be adopted by hiring managers without extensive training or constant HR support.
The Strategic Choice: Why Workable Aligned with Roughriders’ Needs
The decision to transition to Workable emerged from strategic conversations at the league level, prompting Kim Gallagher to explore the platform’s capabilities. What she discovered was a talent acquisition solution that perfectly matched the organization’s scale and operational requirements, without the prohibitive overhead and superfluous features often associated with large-scale enterprise 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 bespoke fit was a critical factor for an organization that values efficiency and practical utility.
Two specific features decisively sealed the partnership. First, the visual pipeline offered a revolutionary upgrade from their previous experience. The ability to clearly see candidates progressing through defined stages of the hiring process provided unparalleled transparency and control, empowering both HR and hiring managers. Second, the multi-board job posting capability addressed a significant pain point. For a small team, the time previously required to manually post roles across every relevant job board, including Saskatchewan-specific platforms like SAS Jobs, was substantial. Workable consolidated this into a single, streamlined action. "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, highlighting the immense time savings and increased reach.
Seamless Integration and Rapid Adoption: "Like Flipping a Switch"
The implementation of Workable was remarkably smooth, described by Kim Gallagher as being "like flipping a switch." This seamless transition was a testament to Workable’s design and the meticulous planning involved. The primary concern prior to rollout was ensuring Workable’s integration with the Roughriders’ existing website to seamlessly direct candidates into the new hiring pipeline. This critical transition was handled without any disruption to ongoing recruitment efforts. For a brief period, the old system remained active to finalize existing postings, while all new roles were immediately launched through Workable from day one.
Perhaps most striking was the minimal onboarding required for the Roughriders’ team. The platform’s inherent intuitiveness meant that hiring managers could navigate it independently, grasping its functionalities with ease. "It was so user friendly that you could just figure it out. Everything was right there on the screen," Gallagher noted. This ease of use extended even to the organization’s top leadership. The CEO, when 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 support or intervention from the HR team. This level of self-sufficiency underscores Workable’s user-centric design and its effectiveness in diverse organizational contexts.
Revolutionizing Evaluation and Collaboration with Advanced Tools
With Workable firmly in place, the Saskatchewan Roughriders were able to standardize their candidate evaluation process in ways that were previously unattainable. Scorecards are now universally employed across all searches, requiring hiring managers to score every candidate, ensuring a consistent and objective assessment framework. A recent enhancement, suggested by their Workable account executive, Nick, upgraded the evaluation system from a basic "thumbs up/thumbs down" to a more nuanced five-star rating scale. This seemingly minor change had an immediate and profound impact, with Gallagher declaring it "life-changing." She added, "Sometimes you’re just not quite sure. Our hiring managers loved having that nuance." This refinement allowed for more precise feedback and better-informed hiring decisions.
The platform’s AI screening capability also quickly became an invaluable tool, particularly during periods of high application volume, such as the surge experienced after the Grey Cup victory. Gallagher leveraged this feature to streamline the initial review process. "I would sort by match percentage and start with the 100% ones first – almost like a warm lead. 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 filtering significantly reduced the manual burden on the HR team, allowing them to prioritize top matches efficiently without inadvertently overlooking qualified candidates.
Customized application questions added another layer of precision to the screening process. The team utilizes these questions to clarify critical details, such as work authorization for Canadian roles—a meaningful filter given the frequent misassumption by applicants that a U.S. passport grants the right to work in Canada. These questions are also used to request essential materials like portfolio links for creative roles or, in a truly distinctive use case, audition tape links from prospective mascot candidates. Gallagher emphasized the strategic intent behind these questions: "We don’t use questions to screen people out, but they tell us a lot about who’s serious and who’s mass applying." This targeted approach ensures that the team invests its time in engaging with genuinely interested and qualified candidates.
Data-Driven Reporting: Elevating HR’s Strategic Influence
One of the most significant operational shifts observed since the implementation of Workable has been Kim Gallagher’s enhanced ability to quantify and communicate the impact of her team’s work to executive leadership. Workable’s robust and user-friendly reporting features have been instrumental in this transformation. "The reporting is so easy. You click and the stuff shows up. 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," Gallagher noted, highlighting the efficiency and reliability of the reporting function.
The candidate pipeline report has become a particular favorite, offering a clear and comprehensive view of total interviews conducted, messages exchanged, and overall pipeline movement over time. When Gallagher pulled this data earlier in the year, it revealed over 900 messages exchanged with candidates within a specific period. This concrete figure powerfully communicates the sheer volume and meticulous care invested by the HR team, providing leadership with immediate, quantifiable appreciation for their efforts.
The Roughriders’ internship program, a cornerstone of their community engagement and talent development strategy, has especially benefited from this newfound visibility. The program is built on a specific and impactful mission: addressing the dilemma that students often cannot gain experience without a job, nor secure a job without prior experience. Workable’s reporting allows Gallagher to meticulously document not only how many interns were hired but, crucially, how many students received valuable interview experience with a professional sports organization. This metric goes beyond simple headcount, capturing the full scope of the program’s profound community impact and its role in fostering future talent. "We like to do as many interviews as we can. Even though we can only hire so many students, being interviewed by the Roughriders – that itself is something," Gallagher reflected, underscoring the intrinsic value of the experience offered.
Unwavering Reliability: Reshaping Candidate Experience
The Saskatchewan Roughriders now conduct every stage of the candidate journey through Workable, from initial outreach and interview scheduling to the final offer letters and beyond. This end-to-end consistency is not merely a matter of convenience; it is a deliberate strategic choice driven by the platform’s unwavering reliability. The trust in Workable’s deliverability has profoundly shaped the team’s operational approach. When a hiring manager recently expressed a desire to meet two candidates for an informal coffee, Kim Gallagher still routed the outreach through Workable rather than a personal email. This decision was driven by the understanding that having every communication centralized in one place is paramount, both for the internal team’s record-keeping and, critically, for the candidates themselves.
"When I make an offer and tell a candidate it will come through Workable, you can hear the relief. They know the message is going to arrive. It gives them peace of mind," Gallagher shared. This sentiment highlights a critical aspect of employer branding: reliability in communication builds trust and significantly enhances the overall candidate experience. In a competitive talent landscape, a seamless, dependable communication channel differentiates an organization and leaves a lasting positive impression.
The Mobile App: Recruiting Without Boundaries
As the Roughriders navigate one of their busiest hiring periods in a decade, Kim Gallagher has leveraged Workable’s mobile app extensively to maintain her demanding pace, effectively managing two distinct roles simultaneously. "We have more jobs open right now than I’ve seen in 10 years. The mobile app is allowing me to keep up. It gives me a lot of flexibility and I can work from anywhere," she affirmed. This mobility has proven indispensable, allowing her to stay productive regardless of her physical location.
The mobile app provides full recruiting capability on the go. Saved templates are directly accessible, meaning a candidate follow-up that might otherwise be delayed until the next morning can be sent in real-time, ensuring prompt communication. For high-volume tasks like intern interviews, the self-scheduling feature, complete with built-in buffer time between calls, has become an essential tool. This functionality allows for efficient management of numerous interviews without compromising the quality or focus of each individual conversation, a critical balance for maintaining a positive candidate experience. The ability to manage such complex operations from a smartphone or tablet empowers HR professionals to be responsive and agile, adapting to the demands of modern recruitment.
An Unhesitating Recommendation and a New Standard
The Saskatchewan Roughriders’ endorsement of Workable is unequivocal. For sports organizations grappling with the inherent complexities of year-round operations, coupled with the fluctuating demands of high-volume seasonal and internship hiring, Workable offers a rare and powerful combination: a platform robust enough to scale with growth, yet intuitively simple enough for anyone – from a first-time intern manager to a CEO acting as a hiring manager – to utilize effectively from day one.
For Kim Gallagher, who has dedicated 15 years to meticulously building the HR infrastructure at the Roughriders and who pioneered the formal HR function across the entire CFL, this harmonious blend of power and simplicity is not merely a desirable feature. It is the fundamental bedrock upon which all other operational successes are built. Workable has not just streamlined the Roughriders’ talent acquisition process; it has elevated HR to a strategic partner, providing the data, efficiency, and flexibility needed to support a high-performance, community-owned organization. This case study establishes a new benchmark for how professional sports franchises can leverage cutting-edge technology to optimize their people operations, ensuring they attract, engage, and retain the talent necessary for continued success and community impact.
