A matrixed org where no one had the full picture

Discord moves fast and operates in a matrixed structure: squads, pillars, and functional teams all moving at different speeds. But the data underpinning headcount decisions was fragmented across Workday, Greenhouse, and a sprawling set of spreadsheets maintained by finance, recruiting, people ops, and individual managers. None of them stayed in sync. "There was an incredible proliferation of spreadsheets everywhere," says Heather Torres, Director of People Ops and Systems. "Information was out of date all the time, so people had different narratives and different stories."

Answering even basic questions (for all my open positions, where does recruiting stand on each?) required manual reconciliation every time. By the time someone pulled the numbers, they were already stale. "You say one data point wrong one time, and you lose credibility forever," Heather says.

The hierarchy of product teams, pillars, and initiatives was maintained in spreadsheets, which meant critical business context was always one step removed from the system of record. This meant leaders couldn't easily see how headcount was being deployed against their top priorities. "I needed answers to my questions," recalls Sat Kriya "SK" Khalsa, Chief of Staff to the CTO.

Caro replaced the reconciliation cycle and gave teams a single workflow

Caro connected Workday and Greenhouse in real time, giving every team the same view of the entire hiring plan, including which roles were actively recruiting, and which were already filled. "It was shocking that I hadn't seen a product that brought Workday and Greenhouse together in such an elegant way," says Heather. The integration ran both ways: squads, which had only ever lived in spreadsheets, finally had a home flexible enough for leaders to actually keep current. As squad updates were maintained in Caro, they could be formalized and pushed back into Workday, improving data quality at the source.

Behind the scenes, Samara Crasilneck, Director of Recruiting Operations, and Millie Angulo, Recruiting Program Manager, redesigned Discord's headcount workflows and implemented automations for creating and updating job requisitions in Workday. "This has made our team so much more efficient. We can open new roles 7x faster," says Millie. They also led the enablement, training headcount owners across the business. The reception exceeded expectations. "They loved the shared views, the customizable columns, and that everything was in one place," says Gaby, Manager of Technical Recruiting.

Recruiting went from reactive to proactive — and hit its H2 targets

"The visibility factor has transformed me into a proactive leader rather than a reactive leader," says Gaby. With real-time data across all open roles and their recruiting status, her team ran a targeted campaign in H2 2025, surfacing approved positions that leaders hadn't moved on and working them all the way down to line managers. "This is why we exceeded our hiring goal for H2. We opened those roles in September and closed them in December. Caro directly contributed to hitting our numbers."

The shift in credibility has been just as meaningful. A year ago, reporting on hiring progress for a priority initiative required the recruiting team to pull data into a manually updated document. Today, hiring progress on the highest priority roles lives entirely in Caro. "Before Caro, our conversations were all about data hygiene," Gaby says. "After Caro, the CEO asks a question and we can answer it. We know our stuff."

Business leaders can finally see how headcount maps to their highest priorities

For SK, the most valuable change has been the ability to allocate headcount investments across two dimensions at once: management reporting lines and the business initiatives (squads, pillars, investment areas) that cut across them. Before Caro, any one team only had a fragment of the picture. "When the CEO had questions, he wanted to see it from FTE, open headcount, and planned headcount, by departments and by initiatives" she says. "We were always trying to reconcile different perspectives on the same question because we all had different tools."

With Caro, SK can see headcount deployed across both management reporting lines and business initiatives simultaneously. "Being able to report against both functional lines and business initiatives has been really important," she says. Caro also captures the context behind decisions, not just the numbers. The discussion and reasoning behind headcount decisions now live in Caro rather than getting buried in various threads and channels. "We don't want big decisions made in Discord channels," says Gaby. "We want to be able to reference them down the road."

Discord started this journey with teams losing credibility over stale data and conflicting numbers. "If the CEO is asking about a squad, you want to be able to answer in minutes, not three days," SK says. For a matrixed company moving quickly, that's the difference that matters.