Mar 04 2019
We implemented Fountain in just two weeks and they enabled us to quickly communicate with over 10,000 applicants through automation. Within four months, we filled over 200 positions and brought our average time-to-offer from two weeks down to three days.”
Dee Labriola – Director of Recruiting
Turas Group is a staffing agency that helps top restaurants, including 20 Chick-fil-A brands to source, recruit and hire staff for different locations. The Group realized that there was a need to improve their internal recruiter productivity. Fountain provided a complete hiring solution to enable Turas Group to streamline their hiring process in order to recruit staff for every Chick-fil-A location they serve, in record time.
The positive results for Turas Group include increasing recruiter productivity to effectively manage nearly 2,000 applicants at one time.
Turas Group also received the following benefits when using Fountain as part of their strategic sourcing:
- Our user-friendly interface coupled with our helpful and knowledgeable team who provide a first-class user experience. As a result, the time between implementation of Fountain and going live for Turas Group was only two weeks.
- Applicants would typically have to wait for two weeks to receive an offer. Fountain significantly reduced their time to offer to an average of three days.
Challenges and solutions: Increasing recruiter productivity
Here are the main challenges Turas Group encountered before partnering with Fountain and how we provided solutions to meet (and exceed) expectations.
Improving recruiter productivity for timely communication
In this age of instantaneous communication and social media, strategic sourcing needs to include timely and accurate communication to each and every applicant. Turas Group recruits hourly workers for its clients’ restaurants. This type of worker increasingly expects an ‘Amazon Prime’ type of experience.
[Click here to learn how Amazon Prime changed the hiring game and how you can benefit from this shift.]
Consideration needs to be given to the fact that applicants apply for more than one job at a time. Usually, the company with the quickest and most productive recruiting process secures the candidate. Companies choose a staffing agency because they believe that the agency has the capability and tools to source and recruit the best applicants. However, the best sourcing tactics can be negatively affected if applicants have to wait for weeks to receive communication, which was previously the case for the Turas Group.
Given that Turas Group managed recruitment for 20 Chick-fil-A restaurants, communicating effectively with each applicant was one of their biggest issues. The communication timeliness needed to be addressed. This issue was urgent because Turas Group wanted to ensure that suitable candidates were not being lost to companies who had a streamlined way of keeping them informed.
Fountain provided the solution for Turas Group’s communication issue by removing the manual element involved in contacting qualified applicants. Fountain replaced the inefficient process of contacting applicants with recruiting automation that leveraged an SMS feature. After Turas Group partnered with Fountain, every qualified applicant received communication immediately.
Turas Group was able to use the automation feature to quickly and effectively communicate with 10,000 applicants. This ensured that the qualified applicants were engaged in the process right away. Keeping qualified applicants updated required no manual effort from the team at Turas Group. Considering the volume of qualified applicants, removing manual communication from this part of the process has resulted in saving an enormous amount of time and resources.
The use of SMS messages is ideal to reach all applicants because most will have access to a mobile phone. SMS messages can be received by the applicant, irrespective of whether they have access to Wi-Fi. Therefore, Fountain’s automated SMS messaging feature is convenient for both the applicant and for the hiring company.
Fountain’s SMS messaging feature can also be used to communicate with applicants for:
- Sending reminders to upload documents.
- Scheduling interviews.
- Sending reminders of upcoming events.
Fountain also provides the option of communicating with your applicants via email if this is your preferred source of communication.
Improving recruiter productivity by removing disjointed systems
Chick-fil-A is a franchise and, as a result, Turas Group had to work with each franchisee’s unique Applicant Tracking System (ATS). An ATS is software that tracks applicants in a single database. An ATS also allows companies to manage applicants electronically. The fact that each one of the 20 Chick-fil-As had their own ATS was another massive pain point Turas Group.
Having distinct ATSs meant that, in order to get access to applicants’ information, Turas Group needed to log in to every ATS separately. This was followed up by extracting the applicants’ information manually. The lack of integration between the different ATSs meant that Turas Group was decreasing recruiter productivity and effort finding and managing applicants’ details.
Fountain addressed this inefficient practice by providing Turas Group with a single source for the aggregated information from the separate ATS. The information from all the separate ATSs was uploaded into a single Fountain dashboard. This single version of the truth was achieved by utilizing recruiting automation.
Using one Fountain dashboard not only saved time, but it is also likely to reduce the number of errors that could result in checking different systems manually. Checking 20 ATSs manually could result in mistakes due to the large volume of applicants. With all the applicants’ information in one place, Turas Group employees only have to concern themselves with logging into one system with the assurance that they will find all the details they need in relation to the applicants for the Chick-fil-A franchisees they serve.
Reduce pressure on the hiring team to increase recruiter productivity
Turas Group has a small hiring team to handle thousands of applications. Different companies have set criteria for the amount of applicants that one recruiter can manage at one time. According to The Society of Human Resource Management, this number can range from under 10 to more than one 100 applicants. Allocating a high number of applicants to recruiters without automated processes can lead to burnout.
Manually handling hundreds of applicants can lead to a stressful work environment and decrease recruiter productivity. Recruiters who rely on manual processes when vetting applicants could feel like they are fighting a losing battle. The recruitment process can feel like an endless conveyor belt of doing the same repetitive tasks.
Most recruiters want to do a good job to hire the best candidates for their clients. However, through no fault of their own, they may not be able to achieve the best results and their productivity will suffer. If a staffing agency has not taken advantage of the latest automation techniques, the recruiter will always feel highly pressurized to reduce long time to hire metrics. Motivated recruiters should be provided with the latest technology to modernize their hiring practices in order to do their jobs more efficiently.
[Download our free Modern Hiring Guide for more information about how to take advantage of the latest developments in technology, including A.I and machine learning.]
Staffing agencies need to find the right balance when considering the amount of applicants that recruiters can manage. Too many applicants could result in the recruiter being overwhelmed and too few applicants can mean that the recruiter is bored and not sufficiently challenged in the role.
Fountain increased the number of applicants to recruiters for Turas Group. After partnering with Fountain, each recruiter at Turas Group effectively manages 1,600 candidates. This figure was achieved because most of the manual requirements have been removed from the hiring process. As a result, each recruiter is more productive and can manage a greater number of applicants without feeling unduly pressurized.
How does Turas Group know that this high number of applicants per recruiter is effective and sustainable?
Fountain provides a full suite of analytics to allow Turas Group to gain high-level insights and detailed analysis of their hiring process. This gives the Group the data required to determine what is working and the areas that are in need of improvement. The analytics give Turas Group the data to make smarter recruitment decisions. For example, a decision could be made to allocate more applicants to recruiters because of the efficiencies that have been introduced with automating the hiring process.
Fountain’s analytics dashboard helps you to improve the hiring process for your candidates and recruiters by offering the following:
Applicant conversion – You can optimize your hiring funnel to boost conversion at different stages.
Team performance – Keep an eye on your workflow to determine when people should be added to your team.
Stage metrics – Get a visual representation of the bottlenecks in your process and take action to fix any issues.
Drop-off insights – Find out the reasons behind applicants’ rejections.
Hire rate – Determine how many applicants are required to meet your hiring objectives.
- Long time to offer periods
According to a survey by Glassdoor, restaurants and bars had one of the shortest interview processes of 10.2 days. Turas Group applicants received an offer within two weeks, which kept it in line with the industry average. Like most companies, however, the Group wanted to exceed the industry average in relation to all recruitment metrics. Long time-to-offer and time-to-hire rates affects the quality of candidates that are available to Chick-fil-A. By significantly reducing the time to offer rates, Turas Group ensures that they engage and hire the best candidates for Chick-fil-A.
Fountain’s solution resulted in a time-to-offer reduction from two weeks to an average time of three days. This decrease in the time to offer means that applicants can start their jobs quicker, subject to the appropriate vetting and background checks.
Remove manual hiring processes to increase recruiter productivity
Turas Group’s internal hiring process was originally made up of inefficient manual processes that marred recruiter productivity. These manual processes resulted in:
- Delays in communicating with the right applicants.
- Recruiters managing fewer applicants.
- Increased time to offer periods.
- Possible loss of suitable candidates to companies that had shorter time to hire periods.
- Potential reputational damage that could be caused by slow hiring processes.
Fountain automated all the necessary processes to streamline Turas Group’s internal hiring processes. Automation was used to communicate with applicants as well as uploading details from separate ATSs to Fountain’s dashboard. The results of automating inefficient manual processes include:
- Providing Turas Group with clear visibility of their hiring processes.
- Filling more than 200 positions within the first four months of using Fountain.
- Increasing recruiter productivity as each recruiter is able to manage nearly 2,000 applicants.
[Read the full Turas Group case study here.]
Click here for more customer success stories about how Fountain is helping companies like:
- Deliveroo to process 10,000 applicants on a weekly basis, while reducing the screening time by 250%.
Book a demo if you would like your business to be the next success story by using Fountain’s automation tools to reduce your time to hire and improve your hiring process.
Our friendly team will give you a personalized demo and walk you through the automation options that are the right fit for your business.
