AllWork is the staffing platform that luxury beauty brands trust to create their in-store sales experience. With around 14,000 active employees currently on its roster, AllWork acts as an Employer of Record, managing, onboarding, and vetting talent for brands including Charlotte Tilbury and Kate Somerville across all 50 states, plus Canada and Puerto Rico.
Hiring a high volume of people comes with a high volume of paperwork. And as AllWork began to scale, getting new employees I-9 verified and onboarded as quickly as possible was becoming a challenge— especially during peak staffing times of year.
The team knew they needed to optimize process efficiency, provide a fully compliant remote I-9 experience, and hand off some of the administrative burden — and fast. Sharyn Rinaldi Dingertopadre, VP of Operations and Client Success at AllWork, and Jenice Bell, Manager of Customer Service explain why they found that solution in WorkBright.
— Sharyn Rinaldi Dingertopadre, VP of Operations and Client Success, AllWork
Key results
- Increased I-9 verification capacity by 3.5x: With their prior I-9 solution, the AllWork team could onboard 2,000 employees within three to four months. With WorkBright, the team onboarded 9,000 employees in less time — a 3.5x increase.
- Employees fully onboarded within 24 hours: With WorkBright, AllWork has been able to shave total employee onboarding time down by half from five to three days. At peak efficiency, the team can onboard a new employee within 24 hours.
- Streamlined employee paperwork management: With WorkBright’s Smart I-9 , AllWork eliminated a manual-heavy task load of naming, organizing, and storing employee files with an employee self-service system.
About AllWork
- Headquarters: Edison, New Jersey, United States
- Company website: allworknow.com
- Size: 14,000+ employees
- Industry: Staffing Employer of Record
- Hire type: Continuous, remote hiring across the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico, including seasonal hiring
- Solutions: Remote I-9, employee records, E-Verify, employee self-service
The challenge: Onboarding and verifying thousands of employees — manually
“In the past, our onboarding as far as the I-9 process was kind of clunky,” explains Sharyn Rinaldi Dingertopadre, VP of Operations and Client Success at AllWork. “We would input the ID information into a secondary service, wait for the background screenings to come back, and then wait on the face-to-face qualifications to clear the I-9. It was a time-consuming and labor-intensive process for our team.”
In a normal month, AllWork onboards anywhere from 400 to 1,000 new employees. In peak times of year, monthly volumes can be upwards of 2,500. With increasing numbers of employees to onboard, AllWork’s manual I-9 verification process was starting to become a bottleneck — and it wasn’t helped by the extra work that the team was doing in the backend.
— Sharyn Rinaldi Dingertopadre, VP of Operations and Client Success, AllWork
“We were spending a tremendous amount of time trying to identify and verify IDs,” Sharyn says. “Sometimes, employees would submit expired documents, or the wrong form of ID. We had to manually organize the files, check them, name them, group them, and upload them.
“In the past, when we mainly worked with smaller brands that had 200 to 500 employees to onboard at one time, this process wasn’t so hard to manage. But once we started working with clients over 1,500 employees, it became extremely inefficient.”
Longer lead times for onboarding and I-9s meant a longer potential time-to-value for AllWork’s clients. But the biggest crunch point came when a global beauty retailer came onboard, and the team were faced with having to verify and onboard 2,000 employees by hand.
“It took us three to four months to onboard those people,” Sharyn says. “In order for us to scale upward and attract more clients, we had to make this change.”
The solution: Fully compliant, streamlined I-9 processes that enable high volume onboarding
AllWork’s mission-critical focus is to get employees up, running, and placed in a store as quickly as possible to deliver value to their clients. But as the contract size began to increase, improving the onboarding process wasn’t just important from an efficiency perspective — it was critical for future business success.
“With the old platform, our clients experienced some delays in the onboarding process due to slower processing time as compared to our new system with WorkBright,” says Jenice. “This resulted in clients experiencing disruptions in their ability to provide fast instore support, leading to dissatisfaction and potential business losses.”
The team had three key criteria when looking for the right solution:
- Fully compliant remote I-9 verification: With a large footprint across the US, Canada and Puerto Rico, AllWork needed a solution that offered a fully compliant, remote I-9 experience that scaled alongside the higher volume needs of enterprise clients.
- Cut down on the team’s manual admin burden: Manually checking IDs and inputting data for each new employee required a huge chunk of time. Reducing internal admin load while maximizing employee self-service functionality was critical to optimize where the team spent their time.
- Streamline employee paperwork to a single location: Increase client and backend visibility with audit trails, streamline document collection and storage, and eliminate email back-and-forth.
— Sharyn Rinaldi Dingertopadre, VP of Operations and Client Success, AllWork
“We’re a virtual company,” says Jenice Bell, AllWork’s Manager of Customer Service. “Other products said we would have to verify the I-9 in person — and that’s just not our world. WorkBright was the only option that offered that remote I-9 verification piece.”
“We wanted to provide the full digital experience, so that it took a lot of the effort and handholding out of our team’s hands — that was a really critical point,” Sharyn says. “We chose WorkBright because being able to remotely verify the I-9 was a value-add to all of our clients.”
The results: Increasing I-9 verification capacity by 350%
A year on from implementing WorkBright across their client base, the AllWork team have seen some huge wins in terms of process efficiency, team capacity, and employee onboarding time.
Instead of the AllWork team doing the legwork to transcribe and upload every Form I-9, employees now handle their own information and document input, minimizing the risk of errors. Files and documents are automatically checked and organized upon upload.
“Employees are typing in their own information,” explains Jenice. “We don’t have to link IDs to users…Moving to WorkBright completely eliminated that back-and-forth.”
“WorkBright is like a one-stop shop,” Sharyn adds. “You can search the person’s information, see all of the clearance activity, and pull those files easily out of the platform. [It] has [taken] that burden off our team.”
The biggest win of all, though, is in how the team at AllWork has been able to shave entire days off their previous total onboarding time and significantly up their capacity for fast I-9 verification.
“Through WorkBright, we reduced the time needed to process I-9s. Before, it was taking an hour to process one person’s I-9. Now it takes us 10-15 minutes,” says Jenice.
That time savings through faster remote I-9 verification gave Jenice’s team back time to focus on business value activities: “The time we’re saving from every I-9 allows us to focus on quality control and helping our clients,” she says. “It’s freed up the team to focus more on account service. We’re able to support our clients and people better as a result.”
— Jenice Bell, Manager of Customer Service, AllWork
When a new enterprise client came in with a high volume hiring need, the team onboarded close to 9,000 employees in two to three months using WorkBright — a 3.5x increase compared to their previous process.
“Our onboarding turnaround time pre-WorkBright was around five days,” Sharyn adds. “WorkBright has cut our time in half. In the best case scenario, we can fully onboard someone within 24 to 48 hours.”
AllWork’s clients were happy too, because they had far more insight into the process.
“There was less friction,” Jenice says. “It was streamlined — and even on our client’s side, it was something they had more control over. If we weren’t using WorkBright, that customer might have churned before we achieved success. To get that hands-on and almost personal experience with that virtual ability… It was something even clients that weren’t tech savvy were able to utilize. WorkBright has provided a whole new experience in a positive direction for our clients.”
“We have a 98% overall satisfaction rate with our clients. WorkBright has been an amazing solution for the inhouse AllWork staff as well as our clients,” says Jenice. “Many of our clients tell us how easy and simple the process is to follow when submitting their I-9s, especially because they can do it from their phone.”
Ultimately, partnering with WorkBright has optimized AllWork’s I-9 and onboarding workflow, meaning they could significantly scale up their operations.
“We moved to WorkBright through growing pains and lessons learned,” Sharyn says. “WorkBright is a powerful tool that has enabled us to improve our internal processes and be more efficient. The I-9 capability is really a game-changer for HR — especially if you’re onboarding a large number of employees. We’re thrilled to have WorkBright as a partner.”
To find out how WorkBright can accelerate your staffing agency’s success in 2024, book a demo.