Walker Advertising doubled in size while keeping its back office lean

Jess meets with Walker’s financial planning and analysis manager once a month to discuss hiring forecasts. This data used to live in opaque spreadsheets, which made it difficult for HR and finance teams to align on approved and backfilled hires. And since the planning sheet was owned and updated by a single person, Jess couldn’t always access it to track progress.

With Rippling, Walker revamped the headcount planning process. “It really does help having it all in one dashboard,” Jess said. “Now I can truly tell the financial manager which hires are planned, which are unplanned, and which are backfills.” 

This newfound visibility helps Jess work on headcount policies and compensation philosophies to avoid unplanned hires that can throw off the company’s budget.

Thanks to Rippling automations, Jess has the bandwidth to focus on strategic tasks that support Walker’s entire workforce, like crafting employee handbooks across the 35 states where workers live and implementing consistent policies for headcount, hiring, leave, and corporate card use. 

Now, Walker’s People leaders can focus more on keeping its revenue-generating workforce engaged. Kimberly Williams, Walker’s VP of People, cares deeply about employee wellbeing. With Rippling, she has access to a secure, centralized hub of employee data that helps the company retain top talent. 

For instance, Kimberly used Rippling Performance Management to identify “brilliant jerks”—employees whom supervisors rate favorably but peers rate poorly. High-level performance review data helped her reveal which employees perpetuate a toxic work environment and deflate company culture. She even calculated their cost to the company’s bottom line.

Swift scaling was tough with a drawn-out, manual onboarding process. “In our old system, it took one of my associates up to 45 minutes. One month we hired 40 people. That person could only focus on hiring because it took so much time,” Jess said, adding that when other employees chipped in to help, they occasionally missed steps that slowed workflows down. 

With Rippling, Walker now breezes through a much quicker, more automated onboarding process. “The 90 second onboarding attracted us,” Jess said. “We joined Rippling last July and have onboarded more than 100 employees. It’s been seamless.”

Instead of manually logging employee information for background checks, Rippling handles most of the process automatically and lets the HR team look at the screening’s status in every new hire’s employee profile. 

What’s more, HR team members get alerts if an employee hasn’t filed an I-9—so they never forget to follow up. Walker also set up a Rippling workflow to automatically send new hire device requests to the IT team, ensuring their accounts are provisioned with software to be ready for day one. 

Jess also appreciates that Rippling delivers locally compliant paperwork throughout every state its employees live.

What’s more, Walker can now prioritize hiring advertising experts who help grow the business over back office administrative staff. Jess had a team of three but one employee switched roles. “With Rippling, I don’t need to backfill his position. That’s a huge thing.” Especially since Walker plans to grow to 300 employees by the end of the year. 

Walker also uses Rippling to generate reports on new hires per month, IT orientations, terminations, and changes to employee life cycle events. The company even plans to auto-send surveys to get data on employee sentiment. 

“Rippling really does show us the numbers,” Jess said.