How LEAP Legal Software saved 20 hours a week and built a smarter, more human hiring process with Workable

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Who Is LEAP Legal Software?

LEAP Legal Software is a cloud-based legal practice management solution built for small law firms. Founded in Australia more than 30 years ago, the company has grown into a truly global operation with offices across Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, employing approximately 900 people worldwide.

The US arm of LEAP, which focuses on support, sales, client success, and implementation roles, is overseen by Susanne Poole, who manages all things people, recruitment, and culture. Like many HR leaders at growing technology companies, Susanne has at various points been a team of one, responsible for keeping the hiring engine running while wearing every other hat the role demands.

LEAP has been a Workable customer since December 2018 and the partnership has grown alongside the company itself.

Hiring Before Workable

Before adopting Workable, LEAP managed recruitment through a module embedded in their existing HRIS. It worked, technically, but it created friction at nearly every step.

The system was clunky and unintuitive. It did not push communications out to hiring managers automatically, which meant that staying on top of candidate feedback required Susanne to physically track people down, follow up repeatedly, and remind stakeholders of where things stood. For a one-person HR operation managing a rapidly scaling company, that kind of administrative drag was unsustainable.

Job board access was also limited. The previous system could not distribute postings at the volume or breadth that a growing tech company requires. For a business operating across multiple countries, that constraint was particularly acute.

“I needed our recruitment to be much more efficient and I needed it to be able to talk to the recruiting managers around the business instantly. We struggled with our previous system in doing that.”

Why Workable

When LEAP began evaluating alternatives in 2018, the organization was still in startup mode and scaling quickly. Price was a genuine factor, which ruled out some of the larger enterprise platforms. But the decision was not purely economic.

LEAP is a technology company, and the platform they chose to run hiring on needed to reflect that identity. Susanne was looking for something smart, innovative, and genuinely intuitive — a platform that would not require extensive change management to get hiring managers across six countries actually using it.

Workable stood out from the first demonstration.

“Workable felt like it had its finger on the pulse. It spoke to what we needed and it was just smart. And Workable has always really delivered on that.”

The people search functionality and multi-board job distribution were both meaningful factors, particularly given LEAP’s need to hire across different geographies with different talent pools. The ability to manage UK and US hiring from a single platform, rather than running parallel systems, was exactly what the organization needed.

Implementation and Adoption

Getting Workable live across the organization was, in Susanne’s words, remarkably straightforward.

Susanne distributed learning videos to hiring managers and ran a small number of workshops to bring teams online. The process produced no significant disruption. At a company of 500 to 600 employees at the time, that kind of frictionless rollout is not guaranteed. The intuitiveness of the platform made the difference.

“People weren’t confused by what we were trying to get out of it. They embraced it quickly. I don’t recall this giving us any hiccups.”

That early adoption was not incidental. It was the product of a platform built to be used by people who are not recruiters, by hiring managers who have full jobs of their own and minimal patience for complex software. Workable met them where they were.

20 Hours a Week Back

The most immediate operational impact of moving to Workable was time. During LEAP’s period of rapid scaling, the volume of chasing, reminding, and manually coordinating feedback that the old system required was consuming enormous amounts of Susanne’s week.

With Workable handling automated communications, pipeline reminders, and candidate status updates, that overhead largely disappeared.

“Easily about 20 hours a week back in 2018. There was so much chasing because we didn’t have a system that spoke to everyone and kept everyone honest.”

That time was redirected toward higher-value work: candidate quality, strategic hiring conversations, and building the kind of talent pipeline that has allowed LEAP to reduce its dependence on external recruiters across most role categories.

A Referral Strategy That Actually Works

Over the past 12 months, 100% of LEAP’s US hires have come through internal referrals. That figure is not an accident. It reflects a deliberate talent strategy built on the strength of the organization’s existing people and supported by Workable’s referral functionality.

Rather than flooding the market with postings and sorting through thousands of applications for support roles, Susanne has taken a considered approach: trust the network, use Workable to manage the referral pipeline, and hire people who come recommended by people who already understand the organization.

“To the point where I don’t even post the role on the job boards at the moment. We took a very deliberate approach to do the referral piece.”

For operational and support roles, Workable has consistently delivered qualified candidates without any need for external recruiter spend. That cost efficiency compounds over time, particularly for a company that is growing steadily across multiple markets.

A Candidate Experience Built on Reliability

For candidates, the experience of moving through LEAP’s hiring process has improved meaningfully since Workable was implemented. Automated messaging ensures that no one falls through the cracks, regardless of whether they are ultimately successful. Every applicant receives a timely, professional response at each stage of the process.

That reliability matters. In a competitive hiring market, the candidate experience is also a brand experience, and LEAP is a company that takes both seriously.

The self-scheduling feature has become one of Susanne’s favorite tools for exactly this reason. Rather than coordinating calendars manually across multiple stakeholders, candidates select a time that works for them. The back-and-forth disappears. The process moves faster. And the experience feels more respectful of the candidate’s time.

“Self-scheduling is brilliant. It connects your calendar, you push it out to candidates, they pick a time that suits them. It stops so much unnecessary back and forth. It is a huge time saver and it always works.”

Anonymized Candidates and the Case for Structural Fairness

One of the features Susanne highlights with particular enthusiasm is candidate anonymization. In a company that views diversity as a genuine competitive advantage, the ability to remove identifying information from candidate profiles before they reach hiring managers is not a compliance exercise. It is a strategic choice.

Unconscious bias is human. Hiring managers, however well-intentioned, naturally gravitate toward candidates who resemble themselves. Anonymization disrupts that pattern, ensuring that the first thing a decision-maker evaluates is what a candidate can do, not who they appear to be.

“It takes out that unconscious bias thing that we all have, much as we don’t want to have it. Our diversity is definitely our superpower. By anonymizing candidates, you’re just finding the people that have what you need. It is so smart and it was so easy to set up.”

Eight Years of Innovation, and Counting

What Susanne values as much as any individual feature is the fact that Workable has continued to evolve. The platform she signed with in 2018 and the platform she uses today are meaningfully different, in all the right ways.

“The innovation that has come out of Workable, I can’t keep up with it. The Workable we had in 2018 is completely different to the Workable we have now, and that is how it should be.”

For a technology company, choosing a hiring platform that innovates continuously is not a preference. It is a requirement. LEAP has found that partner in Workable, and after eight years, the relationship shows no sign of changing.