Revology was still a new company—it launched in 2022—when it entered 2023 with big growth goals. Co-founder and CFO Dan Krzmarzick said he knew two things at the start of that year: “We knew that our hiring was going to ramp up really significantly,” he said, and, “We knew that our business was going to become more complicated.”

Revology initially relied on Quickbooks for payroll, but as its team grew, Quickbooks couldn’t support the company’s increasingly complex needs, like managing varying pay schedules and time-off policies. As he started looking for a new solution, Dan was thinking long term, his eyes on what he called a “21st century” HCM platform: a user-friendly platform that offered a great experience since all employees would use it, plus a system that could support the company’s “hypergrowth,” and work for the entire lifecycle of the business. ”We wanted to find something that worked for us at that moment when we had eight employees and take us all the way up to multiple thousands of employees. We wanted something that could scale,” he explained.

The wishlist: A unified, all-in-one HCM that could propel Revology’s growth, help recruit and hire, automate time-consuming manual processes like onboarding paperwork and benefits enrollment, and create a best-in-class employee experience. Enter: Rippling.

Kayla Ostby, was drawn to Rippling because of its built-in ATS—no integration needed, which means no spreadsheets or manual data entry, like when she used Workday.

With Rippling, “I hit a button and all their information flows into our onboarding system,” she said, saying the process is easier and more streamlined.

But an unexpected benefit since implementing Rippling has been that both Kayla and Dan have noticed an increase in the quality of their job candidates. They both said it’s because the recruiting tools they used previously only posted open positions on free job boards. Kayla has noticed that now, because the overall quality has improved, they are saving time sorting through applicants before moving them down the funnel.

“You go through a ton of effort to hire people,” Dan said. “Missing on a hire is a distraction from our growth goals and we have to limit distraction as much as we can. So quality of candidates is really important.”

During this period of rapid growth, Revology is hiring employees in batches—sometimes dozens at a time. 

Previously, the company’s manual onboarding process involved nearly a dozen steps, from creating an offer letter to sending it out for a wet signature, scanning it back into the system, manually procuring devices, emailing the company 401(k) provider, scheduling a meeting to walk the employee through benefits, and more.

“When you're adding 50, 60, 100 employees at a time, you need automation to do that efficiently,” Dan said. “When someone accepts an offer, now we've automated the entire process.”

That means that new hires now complete the administrative parts of their onboarding before arriving at Revology for their first day of work. Without a pile of paperwork to complete on arrival, Revology can set the tone for a different kind of employee experience.

“Having this capability contributes to having people come in and be really excited about working here,” Dan said. “Having that employee come in the door with such a positive mindset is really important.”

He continued, “Their first day working at Revology, we spend the entire day talking about the company. There's very little if any admin work that happens these days. It's all about, ‘Here's what we do, here's why it's exciting.’ They talk to our CEO, they learn about the product we're building. We can use it as an opportunity to rally them around our mission and our vision and our values and why we exist as an organization. It's much more invigorating on day one than filling out a W-4 when they first walk in the door.”

The one administrative task new hires do have to complete on their first day is learning how to use Rippling. But Kayla says it’s “so simple and user friendly” it only takes 15 minutes.

Another thing that drew Dan to Rippling was seeing how much it offers.

“We loved the user interface component. We loved the payroll aspect. We loved that it integrated into all of the various other systems that we use—Netsuite, Salesforce, the core things that we utilize as an organization,” he said. “And we really love the automation components.”

But more importantly, he saw Rippling's potential to keep meeting Revology’s needs as the company grew in the future.

“We didn't buy all these products right at the beginning, but we knew that we could do training through Rippling. We knew that we could do spend management through Rippling. We knew that ultimately, one day, we could do performance management through Rippling,” Dan said. “We felt like we could consolidate around one technology solution.”

I always tell people that Rippling is the best HR system I've ever used. It's so much easier from not only HR’s perspective but our employees’ perspective, too.

Kayla Osbty

Human Resource Manager at Revology

Before Rippling, Revology offered an employee benefits plan from Blue Cross.

“We had some dental benefits and some vision stuff and they were fine, but that was it. That was all we had,” Dan said.

But he and Kayla realized that by joining Rippling PEO, they could offer their employees access to better, more customized benefits plans.

“When we weren't on the PEO, we didn’t have an employee assistance program. We didn't have this great vision benefit that pays for contact lenses—we never would have been able to do that. We didn’t have the breadth of health care plans that we’re able to offer today,” he said. But through Rippling PEO, Revology is able to help its employees access plans that suit their needs, especially as a diverse, remote-first workforce. “We have employees that live in really rural places in Nebraska, and they have access to a special plan that exactly suits them. We have employees in California now who have California-specific plans.”

Even better—those benefits have become a key part of what helps Revology attract top talent, which is driving the company toward meeting its growth goals.

“The breadth of benefits that we've been able to offer, particularly as a small company, was helpful in making us a more competitive workplace,” Dan said. “When you think about hiring folks, benefits are a huge part of compensation. We were so far behind other companies, and we didn't have the wherewithal to do that on our own. ”

And while employees get access to better benefits, Revology is actually saving money.

At Revology, employees use 50-60 SaaS tools, but “every single person interacts with Rippling, virtually every single day,” Dan said. That’s why the employee experience was so important to him and Kayla when choosing a platform—and Rippling exceeds their expectations.

“I always tell people that Rippling is the best HR system I've ever used. It's so much easier from not only HR’s perspective but our employees’ perspective, too,” Kayla said. “I do 30-day check-ins with all our employees and ask them how Rippling has been going. And more times than not, they're commenting about how easy it is to use—how they can find everything that they need.”

• 2+ hours saved per new hire due to automating onboarding. “When you're adding 50, 60, 100 employees at a time, you need automation to do that efficiently,” Dan said.
• Put off hiring 2 FTEs due to automating workflows. “I never would have been able to do the volume of hiring that we're doing today,” Dan said.
• Countless time saved to focus on strategic, value-adding work. ““I can now spend my time selling our solution. I can spend time with employees,” Dan said. “I can spend time driving the broader strategy of this company.”