Chelsi Grosso is the People Operations Specialist at Kargo, a digital advertising technology company. The hiring process was hers to fix - not because it was broken, but because managing its friction had quietly become the job. The following is a real testimonial from Chelsi about Kargo's custom Headcount Planning app in Rippling.
At Kargo, every new hire used to start the same way: an email, a spreadsheet, and a chain of manual handoffs that nobody owned end to end. A headcount request came in, went to the comp committee, got approved - and then the talent team manually recreated the role in Greenhouse. When a candidate signed, someone pulled the offer data out of Greenhouse and re-entered it into Rippling by hand.
Same information, replicated across three systems–with zero automation.
The problem: A hiring pipeline stitched together by hand
Every change to an approved role - a title adjustment, a hiring manager swap - meant updating the spreadsheet, re-running it through approval, then updating Greenhouse separately. When leadership wanted a pipeline update, our talent and HR teams had to pull from Greenhouse, from spreadsheets, and from scattered conversations before anyone could put together an answer.
We were spending more than 170 hours a year on offer letter data entry alone. Headcount planning added another 260 hours of spreadsheet maintenance between People Ops and Finance. And executive pipeline reporting consumed two hours every single week just to assemble an update.
There were tools that claimed to connect Rippling and Greenhouse, but the problem was depth. They were good at the surface level, but they didn't really connect to all of our tools or provide one centralized location for everything. What we needed wasn't a lighter connector - it was a proper bidirectional integration that could move data without anyone having to touch it.
“We were spending more than 170 hours a year on offer letter data entry alone. There were tools that claimed to connect Rippling and Greenhouse...but they didn't really provide one centralized location for everything.
The solution: One system, zero manual handoffs
Working with Rippling's Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team, we built a bidirectional integration between Rippling's Headcount Planning module and Greenhouse, and a custom app to sit on top of it.
Step 1: Connect headcount approval to Greenhouse automatically
When a role is approved in Rippling, a custom function fires and creates the corresponding requisition in Greenhouse - pre-populated with role title, department, location, hiring manager, and request type. The talent team reviews it and makes it live. Nobody recreates anything from scratch.
Step 2: Pull all recruiting data back into Rippling
A scheduled connector ingests candidate, application, job, stage, and offer data from Greenhouse into Rippling daily - normalized and ready for reporting, workflows, and automation. Everything lives in one place.
Step 3: Automate the draft hire the moment an offer is accepted
When a candidate is marked hired in Greenhouse, Rippling automatically creates a Draft Hire with all onboarding fields pre-populated from the offer. People Ops doesn't open the offer letter. The record is already there.
On top of all of this, the FDE team built a custom app with four role-based views: an executive stakeholder dashboard, a headcount plan vs. requisitions tracker, a TA pipeline view, and an offer conversion analytics tab.
Working with the team was a different kind of engagement.
The manual offer transcription - gone. The 260 annual hours of spreadsheet maintenance - gone. The 2-hour weekly pipeline report - gone. Together, that's roughly $28,000 in measurable annual labor cost eliminated, before counting onboarding errors corrected downstream.
“[Our FDE] took the time to understand not just what we needed technically, but also how our organization works and what we really needed to see out of this solution.
The impact: A seamless, streamlined operation
No more duplicate data entry
TA no longer manually recreates reqs. People Ops no longer looks through offer letters to transcribe data. It's just pre-populated into the fields in Rippling already - so it saves us a lot more time.
Real-time pipeline visibility for leadership
Leaders can now go into Rippling and see firsthand, right away, what's going on in the pipeline - without asking someone to pull it together first.
A handoff that set us up for the long run
What surprised me most wasn't a specific feature - it was what the FDE engagement actually turned out to be.
“They met with us several times a week just to go over the platform, understand our needs, [and] make any adjustments. What Rippling was able to build for us was pretty amazing.
For anyone running hiring across disconnected tools, my advice is simple: don't be afraid to build a solution. Work with your team, work with leadership - and build something you know is going to benefit your organization in the long run.
The spreadsheet doesn't go away because people stop using it. It goes away because the system no longer needs it.
Want to explore what a custom solution could look like for your team? Reach out to your account manager to connect with Rippling's FDE team.
Disclaimer
Rippling and its affiliates do not provide tax, accounting, or legal advice. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide or be relied on for tax, accounting, or legal advice. You should consult your own tax, accounting, and legal advisors before engaging in any related activities or transactions.
