Overview

Industry: Hospitality & Restaurant
Company Size: 5000+
Location: North America (Canada and the United States)

Summary:

Earls, a well-known restaurant chain, was facing significant challenges in reducing hiring times and meeting targets for their upcoming recruitment fairs. With a fast-paced environment, increased growth, and a need for high-quality hires, Earls turned to Alltourage to help accelerate their hiring process and recruit more talent. This case study explores how Earls leveraged Alltourage to generate more qualified candidates and successfully hit their recruitment fair targets.

Challenges

Before Alltourage, Earls encountered several issues in their hiring process:

• Lengthy Hiring Process: The traditional recruitment methods, including email and online job boards, led to an average time-to-hire of 30 days, causing delays in staffing.
  
  
• Recruitment Fair Pressure: Earls faced pressure to meet hiring targets for several recruitment fairs across multiple locations, with a need to fill hundreds of entry-level roles over 50 locations in a short period
  
  
• High Rate of Attrition: Employee retention was low due to lack of connection into community and candidates being sourced online rather than through a tight-knit network

These challenges not only hindered Earls' ability to meet staffing needs but also impacted the customer experience due to growing demand of high seasons.

Solution

To address these challenges, Earls decided to partner with Alltourage designed to simplify and expedite the referral process through SMS messaging. The approach included:

1. Integrating SMS Referral into Referral Strategy: Earls introduced Alltourage to their team before launching their hiring fairs, which allowed employees to refer candidates directly from their mobile phones. This gave Earls the ability to capture candidates before hiring season begun. This approach help serve as a benchmark of where candidate gaps were leading up to the hiring fair.
   
   
2. Incentivizing Referrals: Earls launched a campaign offering rewards for successful referrals made through the Alltourage, encouraging employees to participate actively by gamifying their referral program across all locations.
   
   
3. Aligning Recruitment Efforts with Hiring Fairs: Alltourage was timed to coincide with the recruitment fairs to help offset hiring fair effort as well as ensuring referred candidates were prioritized for interviews during these events.

Implementation Process

SMS referral program was carried out over four weeks, with the following key actions:

• Onboarding & Awareness: Earls sent out communications to employees, highlighting the use of Alltourage and the rewards associated with it.
  
  
• Campaign Launch: Alltourage was launched with a series of reminders and updates sent via SMS to keep employees engaged.
  
  
• Integration with ATS: Referred candidates were synced into the Earls ATS system to ensure a streamlined process and capturing the source candidates came from.

Results

The results of implementing the SMS referral program were immediate and impressive:

• First referral within 20min of initial SMS: The time-to-hire was reduced from 30 days to 15 days, significantly speeding up the recruitment process.
  
  
• Over 350 job applications in a span of 14 days: Out of the 9 jobs posted, job applications were continuously received.
  
  
• Referrer and candidate engagement rate of over 50%: The referral forwarding and candidate open rate captured a steady level of engagement of more than half of the Earls team

Conclusion

By implementing Alltourage, Earls successfully achieved above all their recruitment fair targets. Earls implementation of Alltourage was seamless and easy which allowed the Earls team to put their energy and focus on recruitment rather than the day-to-day operations. The result was higher than average candidates and strong quality hires for their busy hiring season.

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