From ad hoc to clarity: How Financial Modelling Prep reclaimed 75% of its HR time

About the business

Financial Modelling Prep (FMP) is a fast-growing Canadian fintech company that sells financial data to institutional and individual clients. What started as a team of less than ten people just three years ago has grown to nearly 50 employees worldwide — and the company shows no signs of slowing down. With a pipeline of open roles and an accelerating growth trajectory, FMP is firmly in scale-up mode.

Jamie Stober joined FMP in March as the company’s first dedicated HR hire. As Head of HR and Talent, she owns everything from recruitment and onboarding to payroll, employee relations, learning and development and compliance. Essentially, any function that isn’t pure engineering or finance.

The challenge

When Jamie joined FMP, there was no HR infrastructure to speak of. The company had been running payroll through Employment Hero, but recruitment and employee records lived in a patchwork of internal tools and Google Drive folders; a setup that worked for eight people, but was quickly becoming unmanageable at 50.

As the sole HR professional, Jamie was spending the vast majority of her time on manual administration rather than strategic work. The core pain points were hard to ignore:

• An internal ATS with no structure: The homegrown recruitment tool displayed applicants in a flat list with no candidate profiles, no sorting, no built-in communication templates and no way to link a single applicant across multiple job postings. One candidate applying to seven roles meant seven separate rejection actions; manually, every time.
• Everything lived in the wrong place: Resumes, interview notes, employment letters and time-off records were scattered across Google Drive and spreadsheets, requiring constant manual data entry and duplication to keep things in sync.
• No job board distribution: Roles had to be posted to job boards like Indeed manually. There was no automated syndication, which meant fewer applicants and a lot more legwork for Jamie.
• Time-off tracking without visibility: Vacation was managed through Excel. Approvals happened, but there was no running tally of remaining days, no self-serve portal for employees and no audit trail.

“It just wasn’t working. It took so much time and was very heavy on administration. One person could apply to seven different jobs, and they had seven different profiles. Which meant you had to reject them seven times.”

Faced with the prospect of doubling headcount again, Jamie knew that scaling on this foundation wasn’t an option.

The solution

Having evaluated the market, Jamie and FMP’s C-suite landed on Employment Hero as the platform to consolidate everything into a single source of truth. The deciding factors were straightforward: Employment Hero offered an integrated ATS, HRIS and Canadian payroll under one roof at a price point that made sense for a company of FMP’s size.  

Other platforms in the running couldn’t match that all-in-one combination — the absence of built-in Canadian payroll would have meant maintaining a second system, exactly the kind of fragmentation Jamie was trying to eliminate.

Implementation took approximately six weeks, including FMP’s first payroll run. Within that window, Jamie had the platform live with the full team, payroll processed without a single complaint and recruitment workflows overhauled.

Key features driving FMP’s efficiency include:

• Consolidated ATS with automated job board syndication: Roles now publish automatically to Career Beacon, Indeed and the Employment Hero job board simultaneously, driving hundreds of applicants per role without any additional manual effort.
• Candidate-centric recruitment workflow: The split-screen resume view allows Jamie to review a candidate’s full profile and resume side-by-side without opening a new tab, then action the candidate without losing her place in the pipeline. Purpose-built rejection and interview email templates mean communications are consistent and fast.
• Self-serve time-off management: Employees can submit requests and check their remaining balances without emailing HR, replacing an Excel-based process that provided no real-time visibility.
• Centralized employee files with document templates: Employment letters, verification documents and offer packages will be generated and stored directly in each employee’s profile, eliminating the manual create-save-email-sign loop that previously consumed hours of Jamie’s week.

“The recruitment platform specifically is incredible. It’s so easy. You can literally hold a candidate and move them back and forth. And the implementation was super efficient.”

The ROI

The numbers Jamie puts to the transformation are striking. Before Employment Hero, she estimates that roughly 30 of her 40 weekly working hours were absorbed by HR administration.. Today, that figure has dropped to around 10 hours, even with significantly more roles posted and more applicants flowing through the pipeline.

That’s a 75–80% reduction in administrative time, freeing Jamie up for actual interviews, strategic hiring and building out the HR function FMP needs to support its next phase of growth.

“75 to 80 percent of the time — I guarantee it’s going to save me that much. That’s all I was doing. I felt like an administrative assistant just trying to recruit, and it was relatively impossible.”

Beyond recruitment, the platform is already delivering in other areas:

• First payroll, zero complaints: FMP’s inaugural Employment Hero payroll run processed without a single issue raised by employees; a high-stakes milestone for any HR leader running payroll for the first time.
• Self-serve time-off is live, with a wider rollout on the horizon: Employees have already organically adopted the vacation and time-off tracking features on their own. Jamie anticipates that as she introduces more self-serve features, they will drastically reduce ad-hoc inbox requests.
• Compliance groundwork laid for Ontario growth: As FMP approaches the 25-employee threshold in Ontario, the platform’s ability to track salary disclosures in postings and maintain documented records of candidate communication will be essential for meeting provincial pay transparency and employment standards obligations.
• One platform instead of three: Eliminating the need for separate payroll, ATS and document management tools (and the manual data transfers between them) has simplified operations and removed a significant source of error and duplication.

“It’s a really good platform for the amount that it costs. The fact that it automatically scrapes our jobs; that’s been fantastic.”

Why it matters

For a solo HR professional managing a team of 50 and growing, the margin for error is narrow and the cost of inefficiency is high. Jamie’s experience at FMP is a clear example of what happens when the wrong infrastructure meets rapid growth: the administrative burden compounds until it crowds out everything else.

Employment Hero gave FMP’s HR function the foundation it needed to operate at scale – not just by automating individual tasks, but by consolidating the entire employee lifecycle into a single, navigable system. With that infrastructure in place, Jamie can focus on what actually moves the business forward: finding the right people, getting them up to speed quickly and building the kind of HR function a 100-person fintech company will need.

“I’ve worked in recruitment for over 20 years. I’ve used SuccessFactors, Taleo, Workday, Dayforce. This is probably one of the better ones for a company our size. Exceptionally user-friendly.”