SAVARD Personnel Group turned to Avionté to break through the operational ceiling created by manual recruiting workflows by automating key processes, modernizing candidate engagement, and building a scalable foundation for acquisition-driven growth.
SAVARD Personnel Group has scaled by mastering what most staffing firms struggle to sustain — rapid adaptation. From its early days in marine labor to expanding into light industrial, hospitality, clerical, and professional staffing, SAVARD has continuously evolved to meet shifting client demand across multiple verticals, service lines, and client types.
“Our success has come from really listening to our customers and tailoring solutions that work for them. In staffing, you can’t force people into a mold. People don’t fit that way. You have to stay flexible, and more importantly, translate that flexibility into scale and speed to truly serve your clients.”
Alex HelwigDirector of IT & Continuous Innovation, SAVARD Personnel Group
But that same growth introduced increasing operational complexity, complexity that compounded over time and ultimately became a ceiling on how fast the business could move forward.
Despite its rapid expansion, SAVARD’s recruitment processes remained largely unchanged, which began to slow growth. As the company grew, limited automation and rising operational complexity made it increasingly difficult to maintain efficiency at scale.
At the same time, candidate expectations were shifting toward faster, more mobile-first experiences, further challenging the organization’s ability to keep pace.
To scale more efficiently without increasing operational overhead, SAVARD evolved its technology strategy by transitioning to AviontéBOLD, Avionté’s modern front-office platform fully integrated with its robust back-office system, and implementing Avionté 24/7, Avionté’s mobile app for talent, to strengthen real-time candidate engagement. Together, these changes helped the team connect with talent faster, stay better aligned, gain greater visibility across business lines, and operate more efficiently.
According to Alex Helwig, Director of IT & Continuous Innovation at the agency, the result was nothing short of groundbreaking: “AviontéBOLD brings more automation, structure, and visibility into our operations. It gave us a system where everything is streamlined, trackable, and accountable. Our data is now far more actionable and, combined with mobile capabilities, allows us to use automation and notifications to help our teams move faster and engage talent more effectively.”
SAVARD grew by consistently adapting to new opportunities, industries, and client demands. But over time, its operating model didn’t keep pace, prompting a rethink of how work gets done and the systems behind it.
Manual recruiting workflows, traditional outreach, and hands-on coordination became harder to sustain, as growth increasingly demanded more effort and headcount, creating a ceiling on scalability.
SAVARD recognized that the challenge wasn’t simply about improving efficiency. It was about fundamentally changing how the business operates. Recruiters spent significant time sourcing candidates through cold outreach, onboarding was slow and burdensome, and job distribution had limited reach and required extra effort to manage.
Maintaining consistent candidate engagement, especially at scale, was increasingly difficult, and it was affecting not only productivity but also the engagement and retention of the top talent needed to keep the agency competitive.
That question — how do we operate differently? — launched one of the most intensive internal operational evaluations in SAVARD’s history. The leadership team spent months challenging long-standing workflows and asking whether those processes still made sense in a modern, fast-moving talent environment.
As Alex Helwig shared, that effort was intense and deliberate: “It took our entire leadership team to sit in a room for at least four months, from 7:00 in the morning till 7:00 at night, rewriting every single process, re-evaluating what needed to change, and how we were going to do things going forward.”
At the end of that evaluation, the conclusion was clear: SAVARD needed to reduce manual effort, improve responsiveness, and enable teams to focus on higher-value work. It was also clear that slow, incremental improvements wouldn’t be enough. It required replacing legacy workflows, not refining them.
As the business recognized the need to evolve more rapidly, it made a deliberate shift to AviontéBOLD as its core front-office ATS/CRM, and Avionté 24/7 to power a mobile-first candidate experience, setting the foundation for its next phase of growth: faster execution, greater scalability, and deeper, more connected relationships with talent.
“We were stuck in an old way of thinking. It wasn’t until we realized we were losing out on quality candidates because we weren’t meeting them on the right platforms that things shifted. That’s when we started asking, ‘How do we do this differently?’ That’s really what kicked off our evaluation of BOLD and mobile, and a bigger mindset shift around how we operate and adopt new tools.”
Alex HelwigDirector of IT & Continuous Innovation, SAVARD Personnel Group
With AviontéBOLD and Avionté 24/7 in place, SAVARD quickly redefined how work gets done across the organization, transforming both operational execution and the candidate experience.
BOLD provided a modern system that helped the agency reduce reliance on many of the manual workflow processes that became increasingly difficult to sustain as SAVARD grew, including data entry, repetitive candidate follow-up, cold outreach sourcing, and the coordination required to manage candidates across multiple jobs, clients, and locations.
The platform also streamlined burdensome onboarding workflows by automating the delivery of onboarding packages, job details, and on-site information directly to candidates, reducing manual coordination for recruiters and creating a faster, more consistent experience for talent.
By automating and simplifying these workflows, recruiters spend less time on administrative tasks and more time on higher-value recruiting activities. The shift improved execution speed, reduced operational bottlenecks, and created a more scalable operating model to support continued growth.
With Avionté 24/7, candidates could search and engage with opportunities anytime, anywhere through a mobile-first experience. Mobile job boards improved job visibility and helped candidates find roles aligned to their skills, making it easier to connect with relevant opportunities.
Automated notifications kept communication flowing by alerting candidates to new opportunities as assignments were ending, helping SAVARD stay connected with talent and increasing redeployment rates as more candidates returned for additional work. The mobile experience also gave employees quick access to pay information directly through the app, creating greater transparency and reducing reliance on recruiters for routine payroll questions.
By reducing friction in the hiring and employment experience, SAVARD improved responsiveness, strengthened candidate engagement, and built a more connected and loyal talent pool while lowering reliance on costly job boards.
With greater visibility into workflows and fewer operational constraints, teams moved beyond task execution and began using the platform more strategically to improve recruiting and operational performance.
Instead of simply managing processes, staffers became more proactive in identifying inefficiencies and finding new ways to use the system to streamline workflows, improve consistency, and work more efficiently across the business.
Taken together, all these changes created a more scalable operating model as SAVARD entered a new phase of growth through acquisition. The business gained stronger reporting visibility, more efficient job distribution, and automated communication tools that improved engagement and kept talent connected to new opportunities.
The result was higher fill rates, faster insight into role viability, and a stronger ability to respond quickly to changing client demand. With less friction across sourcing, engagement, and operations, SAVARD built a foundation designed to support faster, more confident expansion.
“BOLD, combined with 24/7, has allowed us to maintain the speed we need as we grow through new partnerships and acquisitions. We can quickly import incoming data, set up candidate and customer profiles, and immediately begin recruiting and re-engaging clients for new opportunities, often before a deal is finalized.”
Alex HelwigDirector of IT & Continuous Innovation, SAVARD Personnel Group
What started as a push to reduce manual work and reclaim time became something much larger — a complete reimagining of how a staffing business can operate, scale, and compete in a rapidly changing industry.
By embedding automation, operational transparency, and mobile-first engagement into daily workflows, SAVARD built a foundation where scalability is no longer limited by process complexity. Growth no longer creates operational strain. Instead, the organization can absorb expansion and respond to increasing demand in real time.
Just as importantly, the move unlocked a more innovative culture where staff are no longer defined by execution-heavy work and are empowered to solve problems independently, refine workflows, and drive efficiency across the business.
As the industry enters a new wave of AI-driven recruiting and automation, SAVARD isn’t reacting to change — it’s already ahead of it. With an intelligent end-to-end core platform and a sophisticated mobile talent app, the company now operates on a unified system where data is centralized and accessible, supported by an open API that enables well-integrated, workflow-aware automation at scale.
The result is a foundation that enables SAVARD to quickly adopt new capabilities, scale with intention, and continuously evolve how it connects talent with opportunity.
“Looking ahead, I can’t imagine still being on any other platform in the age of AI. Avionté has provided us with a foundation that enables better use of data to improve how we operate, identify patterns, and stay competitive as we move into this new stage of growth,” said Alex Helwig.
WorkN is now Avionté Mobile. Building on the power and functionality of WorkN’s talent mobile app, Avionté Mobile is built for the high-volume staffing and recruiting industry.
