The Client
PeopleObsessed (www.peopleobsessed.com), led by Rose Steinberg, is a New-York based boutique recruiting and workforce services agency built on relationships, not volume.
The business runs two distinct divisions.
The Executive Search and Recruiting arm is a bespoke, high touch practice refined over six to seven years. The Freelancer and Vendor Services division is a fast growing part of the business that supports outsourced workforce needs for major global enterprises. That second division was thriving. It was also quietly becoming a bottleneck.
Rose Steinberg - Founder. PeopleObsessed
The Challenge: Growth Outpacing Infrastructure
As PeopleObsessed's enterprise freelancer programmes scaled, the administrative load scaled right along with them, and then some.
The team was processing hundreds of freelancer invoices every week, and every single one required a corresponding "mirror invoice" to be manually generated and sent to the client. Each one demanded careful attention to tax treatment, compliance, and cash flow timing.
On top of this, the workflow lived across Gmail, Google Suite, QuickBooks, Bill.com, and banking platforms, none of which talked to each other, all of which required manual handoffs.
Perhaps most pressingly, one person, operations manager Karla Carranza, held the entire reconciliation process in her head and her inbox. So when Karla decided to pursue her master's degree, owner Rose faced a genuinely hard choice: support Karla's next chapter, or scramble to hire and train someone new to handle sensitive financial operations from scratch.
Rose didn't want to choose. She wanted both, and that's what led her to NoCodeLab. "What started as a project to automate invoicing became something much bigger. We now think about AI as part of our operating model, not just another tool in our tech stack."
Speaking about her experience working with NoCodeLab.ai, Karla shared, “Working through this build with NoCodeLab taught me more about AI than I expected going in - we shaped the system together, session by session and each one became a small lesson in how these tools actually respond. Now I use AI tools every day, not just for work but for personal projects too.
“What surprised me most is how simple the back-and-forth is: if something isn't working right, I just describe what's off; if I want the system to do something new, I explain it in plain language and get a working result back. No code, no tickets, no waiting on a developer - just a conversation. That's the real shift for me: to doing it myself.”
The Solution: An Administrative Orchestration Engine
Instead of pushing PeopleObsessed towards a rigid, off the shelf enterprise platform, NoCodeLab built something that worked the way PeopleObsessed already worked: a middleware layer that connected their existing tools through one tailored, highly automated interface.
“Most software platforms require you to change your business to fit the tool. NoCodeLab helped us leverage AI tools around how we actually work and the impact was immediate and is flexible,” Rose explains. "What started as a project to automate invoicing became something much bigger. We now think about AI as part of our operating model, not just another tool in our tech stack,”
An AI powered shared inbox now serves as a centralised workspace, pulling only the relevant freelancer emails out of Gmail based on custom rules, automatically categorising messages and extracting key data straight out of attachments, with no manual re-entry required.
Interactive directories give Rose and Karla a live view of active projects and freelancer onboarding status, including location and operational details, all in one place.
The heart of the fix was automated mirror invoicing. Rose or Karla can now select processed invoices directly in the system and, with a click, generate a perfectly formatted, client-ready mirror invoice straight to their inbox, with no double keying and no second pass.
Finally, built-in drag and drop import tools give the team no-code database independence, letting Rose and Karla update vendor and project data themselves, with no developer required and no waiting on a support ticket. It turned two recruiting professionals into self-sufficient "AI Engineers" of their own operation.
The Impact
The results showed up in exactly the places that mattered most to Rose. Karla will soon start her master's programme while continuing to oversee high volume financial operations part time, with far less stress than the old process ever allowed.
Rose is avoiding the cost, training time and risk of bringing on a new administrator to manage sensitive financial workflows, achieving zero added headcount. And by learning to work directly with their own custom database, the PeopleObsessed team can now adjust system rules and edit data on the fly, without waiting on outside tech support.
The bigger win was structural. NoCodeLab built a system around PeopleObsessed's existing people and processes, rather than asking PeopleObsessed to reshape itself around new software. That is what made scaling asynchronous instead of disruptive.
“Most firms create dependency,” Rose concludes. “NoCodeLab creates capability. Their goal wasn't to own the solution, it was to teach us how to own it ourselves.”
The Next Horizon: Recruiting Reimagined
With the freelancer division running smoothly, Rose is now turning the same approach towards her recruiting practice.
Off the shelf applicant tracking systems, she has found, do not fit a boutique, relationship driven search business.
So, she is partnering with NoCodeLab again, this time to build a bespoke Applicant Tracking System and a Project Command Centre and Search Administration Hub, designed to consolidate six years of recruiting history across hundreds of roles and companies into one system built specifically around how PeopleObsessed actually works.
Want to see what an Administrative Orchestration Engine could do for your business? Get in touch with NoCodeLab.ai