How iLABS turned a lagging recruiting process into a high volume, automated operation 

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Who Is iLABS?

iLABS is a contract manufacturer specializing in personal care and skincare products, including cleansers, SPFs, and moisturizers. Based in Northern New Jersey, iLABS is the largest entity within a cluster of affiliated companies that together employ approximately 170 people. Recruiting there spans an unusually wide range of disciplines: compounders, chemists, process engineers, quality assurance professionals, UI/UX designers, IT specialists, and finance talent, often simultaneously and across multiple entities.

Francesca Gonzalez, HR Coordinator, serves as the primary point of contact for all recruiting across the organization, supported by two HR colleagues who assist when demand peaks. iLABS has been a Workable customer for approximately two years.

What Hiring Looked Like Before Workable

Before Workable, iLABS relied on a dedicated in-house recruiter to manage the company’s talent acquisition. Recruiting was slow, largely reactive, and entirely dependent on a single individual with no supporting platform. When leadership sought to modernize the function, a prolonged attempt to implement Greenhouse consumed nearly the full length of that software contract before the system was operational. By the time it was ready, the contract had expired.

At the same time, iLABS was not supplementing its pipeline with outside agencies, which placed the full burden of hiring on one person without the tools or channel diversity to keep pace with a growing manufacturing operation.

“We had an in-house recruiter and we weren’t utilizing outside agencies either. It was mostly just on this one person, which made things lag a little bit instead of being as fast as we would hope, especially in our industry.”

Why Workable

After being displeased with Greenhouse, iLABS needed a platform that a lean HR team could operate without extensive training, that could handle a wide range of roles across multiple entities, and that could move quickly. Workable fit all three criteria. Two years later, that same lean team is handling more roles, more candidates, and more complexity than the previous structure ever supported, at a fraction of the cost.

How Workable Changed Hiring at iLABS

1. One Coordinator, Eight Open Roles, No Problem

Francesca Gonzalez manages the full recruiting lifecycle for iLABS and its affiliated companies largely on her own. At peak capacity, she has managed eight concurrent open roles spanning entry level manufacturing positions, senior technical searches, and everything between. She does not describe that workload as overwhelming.

The key is how Workable distributes and automates the coordination that would otherwise consume her time. Once a role clears the internal approval process, it goes live on Workable. Gonzalez then onboards the relevant hiring manager with a brief orientation tailored to their schedule and preferred level of involvement. Some managers engage daily, reviewing candidates and leaving real time comments. Others check in on Gonzalez’s notes as needed. The platform accommodates both styles without requiring her to manage the difference manually.

“Workable makes my life more streamlined… it is amazing, especially when I’m juggling so many roles at a time.”

2. Automation That Gives Time Back

Recruiting accounts for roughly 70 percent of Gonzalez’s working day. The efficiency gains Workable delivers are not marginal. She estimates the platform saves her approximately 5 hours per week, time recovered from tasks that previously required manual effort: drafting and sending emails, copying templates, tracking down hiring manager responses, and re-entering candidate information.

The automation workflows she relies on most include stage based email triggers, self scheduling links that sync directly to her calendar, and a rejection notification workflow she configured herself to ensure every applicant receives a response at every pipeline stage.

“I love the automation features. I can just send the email right away. My availability is already set. I don’t have to waste time managing my schedule. It links directly to my calendar.”

3. Reaching the Right Candidates at the Right Volume

For general roles, Workable’s distribution delivers volume at scale. A quality assurance supervisor role recently attracted more than 300 applicants. For more specialized positions, such as a food scientist with a nutraceutical background, the platform surfaces a targeted pool. In both cases, Gonzalez uses Workable’s filtering tools and automatic disqualification questions to reduce the manual review of unqualified applicants. This is especially important for an on site company drawing applications from well outside its region.

For senior level searches requiring external agency support, Gonzalez uses a duplicate job posting within Workable, one public facing and one internal, to consolidate agency submissions and direct applications in a single system. A senior product manager search managed through this approach was filled within two months.

4. Background Checks Without the Extra Login

Among all the features Gonzalez relies on, background check integration sits at the top. The ability to initiate checks, monitor their status, and download results directly into a candidate’s confidential profile eliminates the need for a separate platform entirely. For a coordinator managing multiple active pipelines simultaneously, removing that context switch compounds into meaningful time savings over the course of a week.

“Requesting background checks through Workable is literally my favorite thing. I love that it goes straight to their profile. I love not having to have another website and another login. It saves me so much time.”

5. A Candidate Experience Built Into the Workflow

Gonzalez applied to iLABS through Workable before joining the company. She remembers the ease of self scheduling her own phone screen without any back and forth coordination. That experience directly shaped how she built out the candidate facing side of iLABS’ recruiting process.

Today, every applicant who does not advance receives an automated rejection notification, a workflow Gonzalez configured and activated herself. Prior to Workable, that communication did not always happen. Now it happens at every stage, without exception.

“I was able to implement the automation workflow so that any time a candidate got rejected at any stage, they got that email notification pushed out. At least they know. ‘Am I still considered? Am I not?’ That communication is actually happening now.”

6. Adoption Across a Multigenerational Hiring Team

iLABS’ hiring manager cohort spans first time directors to executives in their sixties. Regardless of where someone falls on that spectrum, adoption has been consistent. The platform’s intuitive design requires minimal instruction, which means Gonzalez spends less time explaining the tool and more time managing the process.

The result is a shared organizational standard. Rather than re-explaining workflows each time a new role opens, the team operates from a common baseline with established expectations on both sides.

“I am fairly confident it’s probably one of the best ATS systems out there. I speak so highly of it every time I talk to my hiring managers.”

Business Impact

Two years into their partnership with Workable, iLABS has a recruitment function that is measurably faster, better organized, and more cost effective than anything the previous structure supported. A single coordinator manages up to 8 open roles at once, recovers approximately 5 hours per week through automation, and delivers a candidate experience that rivals organizations with far larger recruiting teams.

The most significant return on investment, in Gonzalez’s own assessment, is the elimination of the dedicated in house recruiter position. That work has been absorbed by the existing HR team, supported by Workable, without a decline in output or quality. For a growing contract manufacturer competing for specialized talent in a densely populated regional market, that is not simply an operational improvement. It is a structural advantage.