Orange County, California is now Holly's largest county partner! They're also one of the fastest signed users we've had because they recognized almost immediately what a value add we'd be.

We first talked to Orange County in November 2025. The county was in the middle of a spending freeze, but CHRO Jamie Newton and Classification Manager Susie Baker didn't want to wait around. They had sixteen MOUs expiring June 30, 2026, a classification system with specs dating back to the 1980s, and a nine-person team doing everything manually in Excel and Word. Jamie told us to come prepared with proposals so they'd be ready to move when the budget opened up. By December, we'd worked out a six-month pilot and in February, we were onsite in Santa Ana for training.

From the start, our approach has been to build around how their team actually works instead of handing them a tool and telling them to figure it out. We've already partnered with other California counties, so we brought what we learned from those rollouts into the engagement. Orange County's team is now helping us get sharper for the next wave of partners. That back and forth, the listening and adjusting, has been what makes this one work.

Orange County is California's third-largest county by population: 3.2 million residents across 34 cities, and 18,000+ county employees. Their Classification and Compensation Division runs one of the biggest classification systems in the state: about 815 active classifications, with 3,500+ total when you count inactive and legacy classes. They also came to us with a neverending backlog.

Now we're running external benchmarking across 5 peer counties and 6+ comparator cities, modernizing specs for upcoming labor negotiations, and building approval workflows to keep it all moving. The backlog is now a three-year plan, and we're only in month one.