How We Are Social Transformed Global Recruiting with Workable
In the fast-moving world of social-first creative agencies, talent is everything. For We Are Social — a global agency with over 1,000 employees spanning multiple continents and marquee clients like Adidas, Amazon Music, and Lucozade — building the right team quickly and consistently is not just an HR goal, it is a core business requirement. After four and a half years as a Workable customer, the agency has seen measurable improvements across every major recruiting metric, from time to hire to candidate experience to cross-office process consistency.
This case study breaks down exactly how We Are Social leveraged Workable's applicant tracking system to solve the complex recruiting challenges that come with operating at global scale.
Who Is We Are Social?
We Are Social is one of the world's most recognizable social-first creative agencies. The agency builds social content and large-scale campaigns at the intersection of culture, creativity, and data. Operating across multiple continents, the agency serves some of the biggest brands in the world and produces work that reaches hundreds of millions of people every year.
With just over 1,000 employees, We Are Social hires across an exceptionally broad range of disciplines. Open roles at any given time might include content creators, community managers, data strategists, global heads of research and insights, and everything in between. That breadth of talent requirements, combined with the global footprint required to source that talent, makes recruiting both a strategic priority and a genuine logistical challenge. Finding the right candidate in the right market at the right time demands a system built for complexity.
The Recruiting Challenges We Are Social Faced Before Workable
Before fully standardizing on Workable, We Are Social faced several challenges common to fast-growing global agencies. Recruiting processes varied from office to office, making it difficult to enforce consistent standards or compare performance across markets. Communication with candidates was inconsistent and often delayed, creating friction at critical moments in the hiring funnel. Hiring managers lacked visibility into pipeline status, which slowed decision-making and extended the time it took to move from first application to final offer.
For an agency competing in a tight creative talent market, these inefficiencies carried real costs. Delayed hiring means open seats, missed opportunities, and a weaker candidate experience — all of which can damage a brand's reputation as an employer. In an industry where culture and creativity attract talent, a slow or disorganized recruiting process sends exactly the wrong signal.
Key Results: What Workable Delivered for We Are Social
After implementing Workable and refining their processes over four and a half years, We Are Social achieved results across three critical areas of recruiting performance.
1. Reduced Time to Hire by 5 to 10 Days
One of the most significant outcomes was a reduction in both time to hire and time to fill by an average of five to ten days. In competitive talent markets, this kind of speed advantage is transformative. Faster hiring means faster offers, which means fewer candidates lost to competing employers. It also means reduced vacancy costs — the hidden financial drain of keeping a role open longer than necessary. Beyond the numbers, a faster process signals organizational efficiency to candidates, strengthening the employer brand at every step.
Workable enabled this by centralizing the recruiting workflow, automating repetitive administrative steps, and giving hiring managers real-time pipeline visibility so that decisions could be made quickly and confidently.
2. Automated Candidate Communications for a Better Experience
We Are Social implemented automated, stage-based communications throughout the full recruiting pipeline using Workable. Every time a candidate moves from one stage to the next — from application received to screening scheduled to interview confirmed — they receive a prompt, consistent, and professionally crafted response.
This matters more than many organizations realize. Research consistently shows that candidate experience is one of the most influential factors in whether top talent accepts an offer and whether rejected candidates remain positive about the employer brand. Automation does not make the process feel less human; when done well, it makes the process feel more respectful of the candidate's time and investment. We Are Social's use of Workable's communication tools ensured that no candidate fell through the cracks or was left wondering about their status.
3. Process Consistency Across Global Offices
Perhaps the most strategically important outcome was the standardization of recruiting processes across all of We Are Social's global offices. When every office uses the same system with the same stage structure, the same communication templates, and the same reporting framework, the agency gains the ability to compare performance across markets, identify bottlenecks, and enforce quality standards at scale.
Global consistency also makes it easier to move candidates across markets, collaborate on cross-border roles, and onboard new offices into the recruiting process without starting from scratch. Workable served as the connective tissue that turned a collection of local recruiting operations into a single, coherent global talent function.
Why Workable Works for Creative Agencies
The We Are Social case illustrates why Workable has become a go-to ATS for creative and marketing agencies operating at scale. The platform combines ease of use for hiring managers — who are often not HR professionals — with the depth of functionality that a dedicated talent acquisition team needs to manage complex, high-volume pipelines.
- Multi-location job posting and pipeline management from a single dashboard
- Customizable automated email sequences tied to candidate pipeline stages
- Real-time reporting and analytics to track time to hire, source quality, and pipeline health
- Collaborative hiring tools that keep hiring managers engaged without overwhelming them
- Integration with the most widely used job boards and HR tools
For agencies that compete on creativity and culture, these capabilities translate directly into a stronger employer brand, a faster path to offer acceptance, and a recruiting function that can scale alongside the business.
Lessons for Other Global Organizations
The We Are Social story offers a clear blueprint for any organization struggling with the complexity of global recruiting. Centralizing on a single, well-configured ATS is not just an efficiency play — it is a strategic investment in talent competitiveness. When your recruiting process is faster, more consistent, and more candidate-friendly than your competitors', you win more of the talent you need to grow.
If your organization is currently managing recruiting across multiple offices with inconsistent processes, delayed candidate communication, and limited pipeline visibility, the We Are Social experience suggests a straightforward path forward: standardize your tools, automate your communications, and measure everything. The results speak for themselves — five to ten days faster, globally consistent, and candidate-approved.
Conclusion
We Are Social's four-and-a-half-year partnership with Workable demonstrates what modern recruiting can look like when the right technology is matched with the right process discipline. By reducing time to hire, automating candidate communications, and unifying recruiting operations across a global footprint, the agency has turned talent acquisition into a genuine competitive advantage. For any organization navigating the challenges of global hiring in a competitive talent market, the We Are Social case is both an inspiration and a practical model worth studying closely.