To meet the growing market demand for connecting law firms with justice-seeking clientele, Walker Advertising needed to hire more employees, particularly in revenue-generating positions. “Our biggest priority is growth,” said Director of People Jess Kennedy. “That means hiring people quickly, but also getting policies in place to make sure as we continue to grow, we’re being consistent throughout the company.” 

But finding the best talent meant Walker needed to expand its footprint and hire remotely. And to sustain growth, the company wanted to ensure its revenue-generating employee base was engaged enough to stay at Walker long-term. 

All while hiring both quickly and thoughtfully, Walker needed to stay lean. But growing its workforce with a small back office brought its own challenges. The company needed an onboarding process conducive to rapid growth and compliance support that helped register new remote employees for payroll taxes across dozens of different states. 

Walker’s HR team also wanted to spend less time on busy work and more time on strategic initiatives. “The HR shop wasn’t viewed as an HR shop, more as an administrative, ‘we need to do the paperwork to hire someone’ function.”

Walker needed administrative support that’d help compliantly hire a growing workforce—all while clearing the way for HR team members to focus on creating policies that help employees thrive.  

Walker enlisted Rippling to help hire, manage, and scale its workforce. Over the last year, its headcount doubled. “We switched to Rippling to have a system that can keep up with us and the multiple changes we have,” Jess said. 

Even with a 260-person workforce spread throughout 35 US states, Rippling empowers Walker to invest in hiring top-notch advertising teams—instead of an administrative HR staff.  

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.

Now I can truly tell the financial manager which hires are planned, which are unplanned, and which are backfills.

Jess Kennedy

Director of People at Walker Advertising

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. 

With Rippling, I don’t need to backfill his position. That’s a huge thing.

Jess Kennedy

Director of People at Walker Advertising

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.

• Hyper growth: Rippling helped Walker double in size and onboard more than 100 workers across 35 states.
• Headcount spared: Walker grew rapidly without needing to backfill an administrative hire.
• Better reporting: With Rippling, Walker can build reports that help manage teams and retain top talent.