When Chad Herring joined the Snapdocs team in 2020 as Chief People Officer, there was a lot in motion. The digital mortgage closing company closed its series C just as Chad joined, and secured a series D just six months later. With Snapdocs’ incredible growth came hundreds of new hires—the team grew from 180 when Chad joined and hovers around 550 today.
A seasoned people leader, Chad kicked off his tenure by asking his people team for their top priorities. Their resounding answer? “Scaling.”
“Annoying is a nice word”: The leave process before Cocoon
When Chad joined Snapdocs, it was difficult to envision how his team might scale their clunky existing leave process.
“Most companies after 50 employees roll off of a PEO [professional employer organization] but Snapdocs had not,” Chad explains. “There were two human resources business partners when I joined the company, and leaves were managed through in-house support with some administrative support from the PEO, so there was a triangular relationship.”
In addition to being a headache for Snapdocs’ people team, leave was a nightmare for employees.
“To get somebody to the point where they were ready to take a leave could take 30 days to coordinate the steps and even then, there were errors.”
Chad estimates his team was spending 8-12 hours per week on leaves—for just 180 employees.
When Chad realized he might have to devote half of a full-time hire just to do leave management—and when a top sales performer told Chad she expected the leave process to be “horrible”—he knew there had to be a solution that benefited both his team and the entire Snapdocs organization.
Implementing Cocoon
Chad had worked with several other leave management providers in previous roles, where he describes the implementation process as a “90 day intensive where you’re spending 8+ hours with that provider per week to get your leaves up and running.”
Chad says that leading up to Snapdocs’ go-live date with Cocoon, his team of three spent “a couple of hours [with Cocoon] total among them. Some weeks, 2-3 hours at most, and there were several weeks where we did absolutely nothing and Cocoon did all the work.”
He continues, “Of all the [13 new] implementations we did to get ourselves off of the PEO, Cocoon was the least amount of work. The actual implementation was by far the easiest and most seamless, and the service has been the most elegant.”
Of the product itself, Chad says Cocoon’s rule-based engine “has been super simple. My confidence in someone [taking a leave] having a good experience with Cocoon is super high. I knew that with [competitive products] some person would have to get involved because tech could only take it so far. But Cocoon’s productization is complete.”
“A complete success.”
Of course, breezing through implementation was a plus, but next came the real test: Would Cocoon make life easier both for Chad’s team and those going on leave?
“I knew leave created such angst and pain for our employees and [Cocoon] was a turnkey fix. The ease of services and overall experience—using Cocoon has been night and day for our employees; like driving a Ferrari in Napa Valley in October versus a beat up minivan on a cliff on a stormy night.”
After rolling off the PEO and going live with Cocoon last summer, Chad says, “Cocoon has been error-free. I spend the least amount of time on it because it’s gone so well.”
Not only has Cocoon saved Chad time, but he says it’s been great for the wider Snapdocs team, too. “There has not been a single complaint, but we’ve had several emails into our team to say how great it is working with Cocoon.”
And as for Chad’s people team?
“Now as a team, we spend maybe 15 minutes a week on leave; a lot of the time, those 15 minutes are spent just directing people to Cocoon. The time difference for the internal team is 98%.”
Chad describes Cocoon as “a complete success,” noting that in addition to both his team and the overall Snapdocs team having a seamless experience with the platform, he trusts it not to have errors—no small feat when it comes to compliance.
“I don’t think about leave and compliance. Cocoon does that for me.”
About Snapdocs
Founded in 2013 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Snapdocs has grown to more than 500 employees and raised its series D in 2021 at pre-money valuation of $1.5bn, ~2.5x its Series C valuation from October, 2020. Real estate is the largest asset class in the world with residential and commercial combined equaling $228trn, which is 12x the GDP of the U.S. The process of buying and selling real estate which hasn’t materially changed in 50 years. Snapdocs is displacing the old ways and digitally connecting the parties involved in the buying and selling process to make the value of real estate accessible to everyone. Today, Snapdocs is involved in more than 20% of the residential real estate transactions in the U.S., representing more than $60 billion in mortgage value.
The Company’s unique technology makes the process of closing real estate transactions frictionless through automation and integration of the numerous parties involved in buying and selling.The company helps lenders, title, and escrow companies, signing services, and notary publics collaborate to deliver the best, fastest, error-free experience for all parties in the transaction.
