How FREE NOW used automation to reduce employee onboarding time by 95%

FREE NOW was going through a hyper growth phase where approximately 60 new employees were joining each month. The surge of new employees overwhelmed Kevin Schulze, Senior Solutions Architect, and his team, requiring them to devote increased engineering hours to the onboarding process.

As a result, FREE NOW was spending less of its engineering resources on revenue-driving projects and wasn’t able to get its new employees into a productive state quickly enough.

Under Python-based processes, it took Kevin’s team 34 hours to onboard a batch of new employees. There was also the constant threat that, should the onboarding/offboarding process need to be altered, those changes would add significantly more time to the process since Python scripts weren’t flexible or easily maintainable.

There were two main reasons that Workato stood out to Kevin: one, there were no connectivity restrictions—anything with an API could connect to Workato—and two, since it wasn’t code-based, anyone on Kevin’s team could oversee the connectivity pathways and specific objectives of each Workato recipe.

Via Workato, FREE NOW was able to automate critical applications such as Workday, Jira, G-Suite, Active Directory, and Okta that eliminated the manual work in onboarding and offboarding employees.

The solution was intuitive, seamless, and easy-to-manage across the team. It powered new levels of productivity, increased employee onboarding/offboarding efficiency, and gave the entire organization a blueprint as to how automation could radically improve a number of business processes.

The solution that Kevin and his team built with Workato to solve employee onboarding/offboarding requires 95% less time and, in turn, 98% less resourcing costs. It has allowed the team to redirect its energy toward more critical, revenue-driving projects while provisioning employees at a faster clip.

In Kevin’s words, the team doesn’t have to “push tickets around anymore” to onboard/offboard employees, and that became an impetus to seek out more and more automation opportunities.

FREE NOW has since capitalized on a number of other automation projects, including asset management, HR documentation sorting, and Slack notifications for various company requests and self-service needs. The result is more streamlined processes and an overall improved employee experience.