Karat is an end-to-end solution for organizations looking to improve the quality, efficiency, and equity of their technical hiring. Karat provides a more predictive and consistent process for its customers and helps them save valuable engineering time.

Todd Poletiek is Karat's Director of IT. His role is to select and make sure everyone at Karat has access to the tools and systems they need. "Part of my job is to take a holistic view of the entire organization and find the correct solutions for our team," he says. He's also responsible for ensuring compliance with technology regulations across the company.

Intuitive, easy-to-use tools make work easier

As the Director of IT, Todd is proud to offer Slab to the Karat team because it's a hands-off solution for him and his team. "Unlike Jira, Google Workspace, Slack, Asana, and other tools, Slab has been very set-it-and-forget-it for me," Todd says. "From an admin standpoint, that's a win." In fact, in Todd's time at Karat, he has never seen a ticket come in regarding Slab from an employee.

Slab's intuitive interface makes it is accessible to everyone, no matter how tech-savvy they are, which is why it's a great tool for the entire organization. "With other tools, I always have to Google how to do things," says Laura Cheng, Director of Technical Program Management at Karat. "With Slab, it's just intuitive and user-friendly—I never have to Google how to do anything in Slab."

The Karat team also likes using Slab because it's easy to find what they need within the knowledge base.

Search in Slab is unbeatable. It's so much faster than trying to find something in Confluence or another Wiki.

Every Karat employee is added to Slab on their first day. Laura remembers being given access: "I hadn't used Slab before, but as a first-time user, it was easy to understand," she says. Within a few minutes, she understood all of the basic elements of a post without feeling overwhelmed. "Slab's ease of use proliferates collaboration because people aren't afraid of it—that's very powerful for organic usage," she adds. As Laura began collaborating with her teammates, she learned how easy it is to tag people into a Slab post and appreciated notifications from Slab.

Ensuring secure de-provisioning, access, and content ownership

When it comes to granting access and complying with regulatory requirements like SOC 2, Todd relies heavily on Slab's integration with Okta. Using this integration, access can be granted or revoked quickly and easily.

When Todd goes through the auditing process, he can prove that accounts have been provisioned correctly because when you disable an employee's access in Okta, their Slab account is automatically removed. The only remaining step is reassigning content to another user, which can be done with just a few clicks. This is especially important if a post is verified or used heavily by the team—without reassignment, the post could be orphaned and potentially expire. "With some systems, it's not easy to transfer when somebody has left the organization, but Slab makes it easy with access control," Todd says.

From an audit standpoint, Slab makes life a lot easier and much cleaner on the books by helping us de-provision users and provide reports that show our Slab users always match our current employee list, which ensures we stay compliant.

Because every employee at Karat has access to Slab, Todd knows that he can always point someone to a post for reference about anything security or compliance-related—whether that's for information security policies, onboarding instructions, or other documentation. Because Slab defaults to open viewing permissions within an organization—unlike the default private setting in Drive—sharing internally is fast and easy. "Every full-time employee at Karat has Slab, which makes it an easy one-stop content repository," Todd says.

The team also uses Slab for private topics, where they secure information about processes like offboarding—which not every employee needs to know. "It's nice to have our private topics in Slab so only the right people will see that content—and we don't have to worry about the wrong people seeing it," Todd says. "I can add people to a post when I need them to chime in and remove access if needed instead of having to create a different folder."

Using Slab to document—and share—engineering work

Laura uses Slab for engineering documentation. Because it can be hard to organize thoughts in writing, any additional friction from a documentation tool can inhibit any writing at all—but Slab's ease of use makes writing frictionless for her team. "A lot of engineers don't like to write, but Slab offers a low barrier to entry and helps encourage documentation on our engineering team," she explains.

When Laura joined the scrum team, she created a sprint calendar in Slab, where it was easy to create a topic and post in as little as a few minutes. Nowadays, the team constantly references their sprint calendar in Slab because it's how they organize their work.

At the end of every sprint, Laura and the team use Slab for sprint demos. She creates a new post under the demo topic and shares a link to the post with team members, inviting them to populate the agenda and add their demos. Using Slab to both manage and share their work helps keep the team on track and lets everyone across the company know what engineering is working on. With a record of past sprints in Slab, it's easy for team members to browse past demos or notes, whether they're joining the team or catching up after being out of the office.

Engineering also uses Slab for its Architectural Council, which consists of folks from engineering who come together and talk about all things architecture. They also house all of their legacy and current documentation and decision-making in Slab. This documentation of decisions provides historical context that can help people understand how things were built and why they were built the way they were. Having context around decisions made in the past can also help the team evaluate when it's time to revisit a decision or share the history of a feature with new team members to inform future decisions.

More broadly, Laura uses Slab to communicate her team's milestones and needs with other departments so that everyone can stay on the same page. Once a Slab post is written, she'll compose a short message to share on Slack and link to the Slab post. "Slab is a place where documentation doesn't get lost as it might in Slack, where someone would have to scroll to find it," she explains. "In Slab, you can favorite a post and easily search for things."

Slab is better than alternate solutions because it's easy to search and find things, and you don't need training or much documentation—it's self-explanatory.

The importance of knowledge sharing at Karat

To Karat, finding the information the team needs is critical—and it's where Slab really shines for the organization. With a robust search that returns results based on just a couple of words, team members across the company can find information without having to bother a teammate or comb through folders. "People are able to understand Slab and find things without much explanation," Laura says. "Especially in today's remote world, we have to have information at our fingertips that's easily searchable and shareable."

As times have changed and the team at Karat has become distributed, conversations in the hallway don't exist anymore, so searchable documentation is more important than ever before. "To have a solid repository that's always available and easily searchable doesn't just make remote work better—it makes it viable," says Todd. "After all, if you're not documenting things when you're remote, how will people know?"

The answer at Karat is: They document in and search Slab.