It’s 2025 and government HR teams are still making hiring decisions - who gets hired, what qualifications matter, how positions get paid - through email threads.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

A job spec needs approval from seven people. HR drafts it, emails it to the hiring manager or subject matter expert. They suggest changes, forward to their director. Director has questions, loops in legal. Legal sends back edits in a Word doc. Someone forgot to CC the classification analyst, so they get added mid-thread. Three weeks later, you’re searching your inbox trying to figure out which version legal approved and whether anyone actually incorporated the salary range update from finance.

You end up with three different versions of the document floating around. HR has one. Legal has another. The hiring manager is working off a third. Nobody’s entirely sure which is current.

Email wasn’t designed for this

Email is fine for “hey, can you send me that thing?” but it breaks when you try to make it track state.

When a document moves through seven approval stages, someone needs to know: where is it right now? Who’s reviewed it? Who hasn’t? What changed since the last stage? Did the changes from legal conflict with what the hiring manager approved earlier?

Email can’t answer those questions. It can show you a chronological list of messages, but it can’t tell you what’s true right now. You have to reconstruct that yourself by reading through 47 emails and three attachment versions.

The problem isn’t that people aren’t organized enough. The problem is that the tool can’t track the information that matters.

What we built

We started from one question: what if the document itself was the coordination layer?

Everything happens on one live document. When you send a spec for review in Holly, you’re not emailing an attachment - you’re giving people access to the actual document. When they make changes or leave comments, those happen directly on the spec. No downloading, no version conflicts, no “which draft did you review?”

The system tracks state automatically. You can see exactly where each document is in the approval process: waiting on legal, approved by HR, pending director review. Add reviewers, swap people out, extend stages - the system updates in real time. You always know what’s happening without asking.

Context travels with the work. When you assign a review stage, you can add notes: “Please verify salary ranges align with the new pay study” or “Legal review for ADA compliance.” Reviewers see that context immediately when they open the document. No more “why am I looking at this again?”

External reviewers see the live document; nothing else. Need input from someone outside your agency, like a union or city council? Share the same live document without creating a separate copy. External reviewers can comment on the spec, but they only see their own comments - not internal discussions or other reviewers’ feedback. No Holly account required.

Reminders without leaving the platform. See that legal hasn’t responded in a week? Send a reminder email directly from Holly. You can see where things are stuck and nudge people forward without switching to your inbox.

Complete decision history. Track changes shows every edit. All comments and discussions are preserved. Six months later when someone asks “why did we change the education requirements?” - the answer is right there, with the full discussion that led to it.

What this actually changes

Government HR doesn’t have extra time. You’re managing classification studies, union negotiations, reclassification requests - all while keeping your job spec library compliant and current.

The work won’t get simpler. But it doesn’t have to be harder than it needs to be.

When Santa Clara County tested approval workflow, Alex told us: “It’s almost like trying to see how much we can just use this within the system functionality versus having to hop onto a separate email thread to follow up on these things.”

That’s the shift. Not email plus a system. Just the system. One place where the work lives, where everyone can see what’s happening, where decisions don’t disappear into thread archaeology.

After months of beta testing with Santa Clara County and Contra Costa County, approval workflow is now available to all Holly customers.

Want to see it work?

Let’s talk about streamlined approvals for your agency.

Book a demo to learn how Holly is helping local governments modernize their classification workflows.