Every planning conversation started with data cleanup

Motive is one of the fastest-growing companies in fleet tech: Alphabet-backed, 5,000 employees, and approaching an IPO. The company moves quickly on headcount, constantly adjusting plans across dozens of cost centers as the business evolves. But leadership couldn't get a clear, real-time picture of where they stood. "We move so quickly on our headcount plan that not having a system that was as dynamic as we are was just creating massive headaches," says Shane, VP of People.

The root cause was fragmentation. Headcount planning ran through a patchwork of Workday, Greenhouse, and spreadsheets, none of which stayed in sync. Position data entered into Workday was often wrong from the start, reconciliation spreadsheets were constantly out of sync, and every planning conversation required a manual cleanup before it could even begin. "You had a lack of data fidelity and availability between business, finance, and recruiting that created this constant tension," Shane explains. "To have any real conversation, you had to clean the data up first. You had to do this every single time."

The consequences were strategic, not just operational. When finance and recruiting present different headcount numbers, it undermines confidence in both teams. "If we can't answer basic questions, then why would they listen to us on anything else? It just eroded trust."

Caro became the connective tissue between People, Finance, and Recruiting

Caro replaced Motive's patchwork of Workday forms, Greenhouse pipelines, and reconciliation spreadsheets with a single system where People, Finance, and Recruiting could all see the same headcount data in real time.

Rolling it out meant training hundreds of hiring managers across R&D, G&A, and Go-to-Market, but the enablement went smoothly. The product was intuitive enough that adoption didn't require heavy hand-holding. "It's really easy to do things that I want to do," Shane says. "It just works really well together. It's rare that I'm trying to do something and I can't figure it out." Features like bulk operations were especially valuable at Motive's scale, where managing hundreds of open positions can't rely on one-by-one updates.

The strongest signal that the rollout worked: Caro became self-reinforcing. "People are asking other people, 'Why didn't you do this in Caro?'" Shane says. "It's becoming a self-policing system. It's creating its own gravity."

Executives can finally make headcount decisions faster

The problem Motive set out to solve was strategic: leadership needed headcount data at their fingertips to make decisions at the pace the business demanded. That's exactly what they got.

"The C-suite leaders that I work with are in Caro all the time," says John McCaffrey, Senior Manager of FP&A. Before Caro, the hiring plan was largely opaque to recruiting and HR. Now, the same data that Finance uses to forecast spend is the data that HRBP uses to track headcount and Recruiting uses to manage capacity.

Even Motive's CTO, Amish, now uses Caro as his primary tool for headcount decisions. "I've moved to Caro to get my data overall instead of Workday," he says. He uses it to approve headcount requests, track hiring pacing and evaluate org design decisions.

The hiring plan used to take days to reconcile. Now, as John puts it, "The longer term strategic value is being able to plan much faster - in hours rather than days." For a company moving as fast as Motive, that's the difference that matters.