How the Saskatchewan Roughriders hired smarter and scaled seamlessly with Workable

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Who Are the Saskatchewan Roughriders?

The Saskatchewan Roughriders are one of the most storied franchises in the Canadian Football League and the reigning 2025 Grey Cup champions. Unlike most professional sports teams, the Roughriders are community-owned, a distinction that makes their connection to their province not just cultural but structural. In a province of one million people, the organization generated $13 million in merchandise revenue following their championship win alone; a figure that speaks to the extraordinary loyalty of their fan base, which stretches well beyond Saskatchewan’s borders.

Managing all people operations for the club is Kim Gallagher, Director of Talent Management and People Operations, and the first dedicated HR professional in the history of the CFL. With 15 years at the organization and a two-person team, Kim oversees everything from executive hiring to an annual internship program, all with the operational precision the role demands.

The organization employs approximately 80 salaried, year-round staff and scales to roughly 100 additional hourly roles during the season. Roles span accounting, marketing, creative, and digital production, with the internship program adding a high-volume recruiting layer every year.

Hiring Before Workable

Before Workable, the Roughriders managed recruiting through Teamworks Online, which they had used for two years following an earlier era of inbox-based hiring. While functional at a basic level, the system created friction at nearly every stage of the process.

“It felt really chunky. It was tough to manage the process, and it was particularly challenging for our hiring managers to utilize and visualize where things stood.”

For a small HR team supporting a growing organization, that friction had real consequences. Posting roles across multiple job boards required manual effort on each platform individually. A time cost that compounded quickly for a team of one or two people. And without a visual pipeline, it was difficult to track where candidates stood or ensure that hiring managers were keeping pace.

The Roughriders knew they needed something built for how they actually worked: lean, fast, and intuitive enough that it could be handed off to a hiring manager without a tutorial.

Why Workable

The decision to move to Workable came through conversations at the league level, which led Kim to explore the platform’s capabilities. What she found was a solution that matched the organization’s scale without the overhead of enterprise systems that brought features they would never use.

“With being a small organization, it was tough to find a system that matched our size as opposed to implementing a massive program with all the bells and whistles we weren’t even going to utilize.”

Two things sealed the decision. First, the visual pipeline — the ability to see candidates moving through clearly defined stages was a meaningful upgrade from the experience they had before. Second, the multi-board job posting capability. As a small team, the time required to post roles manually across every relevant job board, including Saskatchewan-specific platforms like SAS Jobs, was significant. Workable consolidated that into a single action.

“The time it takes to go to each one of those boards as a one-to-two person team is massive. Being able to spread our ad as far as possible from one place was a big decision maker.”

Implementation and Adoption

Rollout was, in Kim’s words, like flipping a switch.

“I remember it being so smooth. It just kind of flicked over.”

The primary concern ahead of implementation was how Workable would integrate with the Roughriders’ existing website to direct candidates seamlessly into the hiring pipeline. That transition was handled without disruption. The old system remained open briefly to close out existing postings, while all new roles launched through Workable from day one.

What struck Kim most was how little onboarding was required. The platform was intuitive enough that hiring managers could navigate it independently/

“It was so user friendly that you could just figure it out. Everything was right there on the screen.”

Even the CEO, when serving as a hiring manager on a recent search, required no additional instruction. They were added to the job, given access to the platform, and participated in the process without any support from HR.

Streamlining Evaluation and Collaboration

With Workable in place, the Roughriders standardized their candidate evaluation process in ways that had not been possible before. Scorecards are now used across all searches, with hiring managers required to score every candidate at minimum. A recent upgrade from the thumbs up/thumbs down system to a five-star rating scale — suggested by their account executive, Nick — made an immediate difference.

“Life-changing. Sometimes you’re just not quite sure. Our hiring managers loved having that nuance.”

The AI screening capability also became a valued tool, particularly when application volume surged after the Grey Cup win.

“I would sort by match percentage and start with the 100% ones first — almost like a warm lead. I got through all the applicants, but when you’re tight for time and the volume is that high, it helps to know where to start.”

Customized application questions add another layer of precision. The team uses them to clarify work authorization for Canadian roles which is a meaningful filter given the volume of applicants who incorrectly assume a U.S. passport grants the right to work in Canada. Questions are also used to require portfolio links or, in one of the more distinctive use cases in their hiring pipeline, audition tape links from mascot candidates.

“We don’t use questions to screen people out, but they tell us a lot about who’s serious and who’s mass applying.”

Reporting That Earns a Seat at the Table

One of the more significant operational shifts since implementing Workable has been Kim’s ability to quantify the impact of her team’s work to executive leadership.

“The reporting is so easy. You click and the stuff shows up. What I like is that it’s already prepopulated — you don’t have to build it from scratch or risk selecting one wrong criterion and getting an empty report.”

The candidate pipeline report has become a particular favorite, offering a clear view of total interviews conducted, messages exchanged, and pipeline movement over time. When Kim pulled the data earlier this year, it showed over 900 messages exchanged with candidates in the period — a figure that communicates the volume and care behind the team’s work in terms leadership can immediately appreciate.

The internship program benefits especially from this visibility. The Roughriders’ program is built around a specific mission: students cannot get experience without a job, and they cannot get a job without experience. Workable’s reporting allows Kim to document not just how many interns were hired, but how many received interview experience with a professional sports organization — a metric that captures the program’s community impact in full.

“We like to do as many interviews as we can. Even though we can only hire so many students, being interviewed by the Roughriders — that itself is something.”

Reliability That Changes Candidate Experience

The Roughriders conduct every stage of the candidate journey through Workable from initial outreach to interview scheduling to offer letters and beyond. That consistency is not incidental. It is a deliberate choice driven by the platform’s reliability.

That trust in deliverability has shaped how the team operates. When a hiring manager recently wanted to meet two candidates for coffee, Kim still routed the outreach through Workable rather than a personal email because having every communication in one place matters both to the team and to the candidates themselves.

“When I make an offer and tell a candidate it will come through Workable, you can hear the relief. They know the message is going to arrive. It gives them peace of mind.”

The Mobile App: Recruiting Without Boundaries

As the Roughriders enter one of their busiest hiring periods in a decade, Kim has leaned heavily on Workable’s mobile app to maintain her pace as a team of one managing two roles simultaneously.

“We have more jobs open right now than I’ve seen in 10 years. The mobile app is allowing me to keep up. It gives me a lot of flexibility and I can work from anywhere.”

Saved templates are accessible directly from mobile, meaning a candidate follow-up that might otherwise wait until the next morning can be sent in real time. For intern interviews, the self-scheduling feature with buffer time built between calls has become an essential tool for managing high-volume scheduling without sacrificing the quality of each conversation.

Would the Roughriders Recommend Workable?

Without hesitation.

For sports organizations managing the complexity of year-round operations alongside high-volume seasonal and internship hiring, Workable offers something rare: a platform that is powerful enough to scale with growth and simple enough that anyone, from a first-time intern manager to a CEO filling in as a hiring manager, can use it effectively from day one.

For Kim Gallagher, who has spent 15 years building HR infrastructure at the Roughriders and pioneered the HR function across the entire CFL, that combination is not a nice-to-have. It is the foundation everything else is built on.