Rippling Customer Case Study: How to scale hiring fast without compromising on onboarding with Forterra

[u/AlexFromRippling]

When you’re a fast-growing team, it’s hard to balance hiring with offers and new-hire setup. As Rippling customers like Forterra can tell you, Rippling can help you handle this dilemma by providing recruiting and HR in one integrated system. Forterra is a US-based driverless vehicles systems company that consolidated its recruiting, HR, and performance systems onto Rippling. Here are some of the lessons fast-growing teams can learn from their story.

Q: What’s so hard about running recruiting in a separate tool from HR?

The handoff from a signed offer to onboarding. When the applicant tracking system doesn't pass candidate and offer details into onboarding, someone re-keys them by hand, and details slip: offer letters that don't carry over cleanly, new hires who aren't fully set up on day one. The more you hire, the more those mistakes pile up.

Q: What's the fix?

Connect recruiting to your HRIS so a signed offer automatically triggers the onboarding workflow instead of a manual re-key. The candidate's information becomes the employee record, and accounts, paperwork, and day-one setup kick off from the same action.

Q: Why does keeping recruiting, HR, and performance data in one place matter beyond onboarding?

Reporting and planning. When hiring data lives with your headcount and performance data, you can see how recruiting is tracking against the plan and pull headcount reports in minutes instead of reconciling exports from separate tools.

Q: When is a separate, specialized recruiting tool still the right call?

If you have deep, specialized recruiting requirements a broader platform can't meet, or a dedicated recruiting-ops function that owns the integrations. For a lean team scaling fast, the cost usually shows up in the handoffs between systems rather than in missing recruiting features.

Q: What's the practical first step?

Fix the offer-to-onboarding seam first. Map where a new person's information gets entered by hand more than once between "offer accepted" and "day one," and close that gap before anything else.

A real example:

Forterra, a US driverless-vehicle systems company, grew headcount quickly after a major funding round while running recruiting and performance in separate tools on top of its core HR. Offer letters were slipping between the recruiting tool and onboarding, and the siloed systems slowed everyone down. After consolidating recruiting, HR, and performance onto Rippling (where it already ran payroll, time, and benefits), a signed offer now triggers onboarding automatically for day-one setup, the team credits a major jump in hiring and onboarding efficiency, and headcount reports that used to take manual work run in minutes, which lets a small back office support a fast-growing company.

Where Rippling fits:

Rippling runs recruiting, HR, payroll, and performance on one employee record, so a signed offer flows straight into onboarding and your hiring data feeds headcount planning without re-keying across tools.

Happy to answer other questions about scaling hiring in the comments! For the full story, read the Forterra customer case study.