Salt isn’t your typical marketing agency. In an industry known for its relentless pace and burnout, Salt built something different—a company where people come first, always. Chloe McKenzie, SVP of People & Culture, is at the heart of this transformation. Coming from a marketing background and with a popular podcast under her belt, Chloe is a thought leader who brings a creative, people-first mindset to HR. Joining as Salt’s first HR hire in a climate overshadowed by COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement, Chloe set out to create thoughtful people processes and a warm culture from the ground up. She knew implementing an HR platform was a must, and her experience demoing different platforms revealed Bob as a clear winner. Four years later, Salt has grown from 50 to nearly 400 people—a 600 percent increase. To support that growth, Chloe expanded Salt’s use of Bob modules, ensuring consistent people-first experiences across Canada, the US, and Australia while nurturing a culture that’s as intentional as it is innovative. In Chloe’s words, Bob has been a “true game changer.”
Automating HR processes at a growing company
When Chloe joined Salt, it was a small agency with around 50 employees. As the company’s first permanent HR hire—and someone new to the HR world—Chloe understood the need to implement an HCM to automate HR processes, and this became even more critical with Salt’s people working remotely during the pandemic.
Chloe started with onboarding. Bob’s integration with Greenhouse ATS means all new-hire data flows directly into Bob, saving time and avoiding double entry. Once in Bob, onboarding begins with communications, role-specific tasks, and materials to help new employees get familiar with Salt. Contracts and agreements are completed seamlessly with Bob’s eSign feature—keeping the process efficient and paperless.
Salt introduces Bob to every new hire on their first day, exemplifying the importance of the platform to company processes. Bob provides new hires access to essential company documents outlining their values and processes and a view of the company structure in the Org Chart, helping them easily get acquainted with life at Salt. “Bob is the first thing we discuss in our new hire meetings on their first day because it truly is the place for learning who’s who. We tell people to log in and look at who works on what and find people with shared interests.”
As Salt has scaled—becoming Canada’s second-fastest-growing company—the team expanded its use of Bob to keep pace with people and performance. They added Talent and Compensation Management, enabling seamless performance and salary review cycles, and recently implemented Bob Learning, empowering their people with upskilling opportunities tailored to their roles and functions.
Chloe loves that Bob Learning enables them to define learning paths according to people’s roles as determined in Bob, with no need to log into another platform. “I’m so excited about Bob Learning and the fact that it’s connected to all of the other information in Bob makes it critical. We could have sourced an external LMS to create that learning content, but it wouldn’t take into consideration all the data we have about our people and the different things that we want to identify as part of their learning path once they hit a milestone or a certain area of their tenure.” Bob’s all-in-one platform means that all processes at Salt begin and end with Bob.
Building a warm culture in a fast-paced environment
Salt has won several awards for employee experience, including becoming #3 in Canada’s Best Workplaces by ‘Great Place to Work’ and receiving a further nine ‘Great Place to Work’ recognitions in 2025 alone. These achievements don’t happen by chance—especially in a high-pressure environment like Salt. The people team is deeply invested in creating a work environment where their people feel heard and rewarded, and the proof is in the data, with 96 percent of employees saying that Salt is a great place to work.
Here are some ways that Salt ensures a warm culture that their people appreciate:
- Salt’s values: Salt’s culture is embedded in its values, such as ‘Salt of the Earth’, being humble, hardworking, honest, and kind, and ‘Earn your Salt,’ rolling up their sleeves to do the work to earn respect, results, and recognition. Chloe explains, “These values aren’t just written in the employee handbook and on our walls. They’re truly part of our everyday rituals and practices and are embedded in our work and expectations of each other.” And true to its mission, Salt has embedded its values into Bob, so company announcements, Kudos, and Shoutouts highlighting Salt’s people are value-driven and true to the cause.
- Clubs for shared interests: At Salt, they recognize that the friendships people form at work significantly impact their happiness and sense of belonging. They use Bob’s Clubs to help build relationships around shared hobbies and interests, and take their sports seriously! Salt has intramural leagues for basketball, beach volleyball, and soccer, and they’ve won several championships.
- Tracking demographic data: As Salt has grown, so has its need for people analytics. With Bob’s dashboards, Chloe’s team can see which departments are expanding fastest, track attrition and diversity trends, and generate monthly, quarterly, and half-year reports. Since implementing Bob, Salt’s use of analytics and reporting has increased by 30 percent. “It’s not just about data for data’s sake,” says Chloe, “having the data helps us make decisions about the future of our organization.”
Chloe sums up her journey using Bob beautifully. “For me, as somebody new to HR at the same time that we were new to Bob, it was having a partner to help me learn as I was growing and as the organization was growing. So it’s one thing to be responsible for creating a review cycle or talent cycle, and it’s another thing to do that when you’ve never done it or don’t know what good is supposed to look like. So having a partner in Bob showed me what good is supposed to look like, embedded within their tools, and made it much easier for me to shortcut and learn how I wanted to implement things.”
Main takeaways
- Salt has seen a 30 percent increase in analytics and reporting since implementing Bob.
- Managing Salt’s people and processes across the employee lifecycle is easy with Bob.
- With the Greenhouse integration, transferring new hires’ information into Bob is seamless, saving time and eliminating duplicate entries.
- Building relationships between people based on shared interests is simple with Bob’s Clubs.
- Bob Learning makes it easy to create tailored learning pathways for their people based on their position and rank.
