Case Study: Cruise achieves streamlined, scalable onboarding and saves 100+ hours/month with Sapling

Streamlining the Employee Experience in Hypergrowth

Cruise, a San Francisco-based autonomous vehicle company, faced a fragmented onboarding process across recruitment, IT, and People Operations that relied on spreadsheets, Google Docs/Slides and manual emails. This created a “blackhole” for new hires with poor visibility into completed tasks, unclear stakeholder responsibilities, and frequent follow‑up questions — prompting Cruise to seek a purpose-built onboarding solution from Sapling.

Sapling implemented its onboarding platform for Cruise (in a two‑week rollout) to consolidate systems, automate 54 onboarding tasks per hire, and provide a central dashboard for visibility and consistency. Since adopting Sapling Cruise has grown 4X, Sapling now manages over 3,000 workflows per month, saves People Operations more than 100 hours monthly, cuts management time per new hire from 4 hours to 30 minutes (≈3.5 hours saved) and eliminates an estimated 108 emails per new hire.

Cruise

Sheila Egan

People Operations