How Pharmacy2U eliminated 238 manual onboarding touch points with Workable

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Who Is Pharmacy2U?

Pharmacy2U is the United Kingdom’s largest online pharmacy and one of the country’s fastest-growing health tech organizations. With a mission to put people genuinely in control of their own healthcare, the company has scaled rapidly, tripling its headcount since 2023 to reach approximately 1,300 employees spread across head office, back office, and fulfillment site operations.

Leading talent acquisition and development is Rachel Nelson, Head of Talent and Development. Her remit is broad by design: recruit exceptional people, build the skills the organization needs for the future, and develop and retain employees across the full lifecycle. Her team is small but high-performing, four people on the talent side and four on development, operating at a pace that would challenge organizations with significantly more resource.

Pharmacy2U has been a Workable customer since before Rachel joined the business. What she inherited was a solid foundation. What she has built on top of it has been transformational.

The State of Hiring Before the Transformation

When Rachel arrived, Workable was already in place and already delivering value. Manual feedback loops outside the ATS had been eliminated. But she recognized immediately that there was significant untapped potential in the system and that one area in particular needed urgent attention: onboarding.

The onboarding experience at Pharmacy2U, both for candidates moving through the process and for the back-office team managing it, had accumulated significant complexity over time. A swim lane analysis of the onboarding flow revealed the scale of the problem.

“When we went through our swim lane analysis, we had 238 manual touch points in our back office in order to successfully and safely onboard somebody.”

The candidate-facing experience was equally fragmented. New hires were receiving approximately 12 separate communications from different teams, each originating from a different system, with no clear explanation of where they were in the process or what was expected of them. The learning and development team would send one email. The talent team would follow up on references. The people team would request signatures. Nothing was coordinated. Nothing was branded. Nothing felt like a coherent welcome.

“Even me onboarding in a head of role, I had to manually check in with the team to ask if they had my references. That was the experience.”

Why Workable

The decision to deepen investment in Workable rather than explore alternatives was grounded in both product quality and strategic alignment. Rachel had assessed other systems and found Workable superior on the dimensions that matter most for an organization of Pharmacy2U‘s complexity: user experience, accessibility, value for money, and the depth of integration capability.

“The combination of the UX, the UI, the accessibility, and the intuitive nature of the product makes it superior. Whether you’re a recruiter or a hiring manager, it’s very easy to work out what the system needs of you.”

That intuitiveness is not a minor consideration at a company where hiring managers come from across the organization, carry full workloads of their own, and need to engage meaningfully in the recruiting process without becoming ATS experts. A platform that requires extensive training to use is a platform that hiring managers quietly stop using. Workable has not presented that problem.

Eliminating 238 Manual Touch Points

The onboarding transformation at Pharmacy2U is one of the most concrete examples of what Workable‘s automation capabilities can achieve in a regulated, high-complexity environment.

Working through Workable‘s onboarding flow, Rachel’s team rebuilt the entire process: branded, sequenced, and clear. New hires now receive a single, coherent onboarding journey that tells them exactly what they need to do, in what order, and why. The twelve disparate team communications from different systems have been replaced by one unified experience.

“We have one click, a beautiful onboarding flow that is branded. It is really clear what somebody needs to do to get onboarded at Pharmacy2U, which is fantastic.”

On the back-office side, the impact has been equally significant. The team now performs regular checks within the system and receives automated alerts when something requires attention. The manual coordination that previously consumed nearly half of the recruiting team’s time has been replaced by a process that largely runs itself.

“Forty-five percent of my team’s time was spent onboarding candidates. That is crazy.”

The efficiency gains have been substantial enough to offset Workable‘s license costs through avoided headcount. Rather than hiring additional staff to manage the administrative volume, Pharmacy2U automated the volume out of existence.

“We have actually managed to save additional headcount that has essentially covered our license costs for having Workable. We have not grown our headcount. Instead, we automated and reduced the administrative workload of onboarding in the back office.”

Background Checking: From Manual to One Click

As a regulated healthcare organization, Pharmacy2U operates under multiple UK regulatory frameworks and is required to demonstrate that all staff are fit, safe, and proper. That obligation makes background checking not just operationally important but legally critical.

Before the Zynq integration, background checks at Pharmacy2U involved manual reference taking by phone or email, manual face-to-face ID verification, and coordination with external providers. It was time-consuming, inconsistent, and created risk.

Through Workable‘s integration with Zynq, the entire background checking and safety process is now fully automated and triggered with a single click from within the platform. DBS checks, employment verification, and ID checking all run through one connected workflow without manual intervention.

“It was literally a one-click API code that we didn’t even have to think about. Our background checks have gone from manual reference taking to face-to-face ID checks to literally, within Workable, one button. Phenomenal.”

Interview Scheduling: From 7 Days to 18 Hours

When Rachel joined Pharmacy2U, interview scheduling was entirely manual, coordinated through Outlook by her team, and routinely took between four and seven days from the point a candidate was ready to interview to the point an interview was actually booked.

Workable‘s automated self-scheduling feature changed that entirely. Candidates now receive a scheduling link, choose a time that works for them, and the interview is confirmed without any back-and-forth. The average scheduling time has dropped to approximately 18 hours.

“The candidate is in control. It is one click of the button and we have reduced our scheduling down to about 18 hours on average, which is phenomenal.”

In a competitive healthcare talent market where strong candidates are evaluating multiple opportunities simultaneously, that speed is not just an operational improvement. It is a competitive advantage.

Interview Kits and the End of Gut-Feel Hiring

One of the more strategically significant changes Rachel has driven through Workable is the adoption of structured interview kits across all hiring. In a fast-growing organization where hiring managers come from diverse backgrounds and levels of recruiting experience, the risk of inconsistent, bias-prone evaluation is real.

Workable‘s interview kit functionality has addressed that risk directly. Every interview now uses a standardized rubric. Scoring is consistent across every interviewer and every role. Hiring managers are prompted to evaluate against defined competencies rather than relying on impression or instinct.

“We are no longer recruiting on gut feel in the way that we were. We are calling for rubric. Our scoring is completely the same across every interview that we do.”

The data this generates has also elevated the quality of candidate feedback. When a candidate does not progress, the team now has specific, evidence-based documentation explaining why, which both protects the organization and improves the candidate experience.

Analytics That Pinpoint and Solve Problems

Pharmacy2U uses Workable‘s analytics capability for two distinct purposes: internal team performance and external stakeholder management.

On the internal side, Rachel uses hiring data to understand where her team’s development opportunities lie and to measure how efficiently the function is operating. On the stakeholder side, the data has become a powerful tool for honest, specific conversations with the business about where the recruiting process is breaking down and whose responsibility that is to fix.

“We might be getting somebody through a screen call stage in four days and then they are sat in a first interview stage with the business for twenty-one days due to delays in scheduling or moving them on. It has really allowed us to pinpoint exactly what our issues are and resolve them on a granular level with our stakeholders.”

That kind of specificity transforms the talent team from a function that absorbs criticism into one that drives accountability. When the data shows where the delay is, the conversation changes.

A Candidate Experience That Has Genuinely Improved

For candidates moving through Pharmacy2U‘s hiring process today, the experience is meaningfully better than it was. Automation handles the routine communications. Self-scheduling puts candidates in control of their own interview timeline. Structured feedback means that every candidate who does not progress receives a substantive, respectful explanation.

But Rachel is deliberate about one thing: automation has not removed the human from the process.

“They get a good combination of the automation that Workable provides, but it still allows my team to give them a personal touch. It has not completely removed the human from the process.”

That balance, speed and consistency delivered through automation, warmth and judgment delivered by people, is what defines a genuinely strong candidate experience. At Pharmacy2U, Workable has made both possible simultaneously.

A Support Team That Makes the Difference

Rachel is specific in her praise for the Workable technical support team, describing them as the most proactive and responsive she has encountered across any HR platform in her career. When Pharmacy2U was building out its onboarding automation, the support team was engaged throughout, clear about what was needed at each stage, and consistently responsive.

“The technical support team that we get at no extra cost is the most proactive, supportive, and on-it team I have ever had as part of any HR platform I have used in the past.”

That quality of support matters especially for a four-person talent team operating at the pace Pharmacy2U demands. When something needs to be resolved, it needs to be resolved quickly. With Workable, it consistently is.