Customer story
Leading healthy fast-casual restaurant scales nationwide and halves time-to-hire
The company uses Fountain’s customization and automation features to optimize hiring processes.
This fast-casual restaurant brand specializes in salads and other healthy meal options. The brand now operates in 18 states with over 200 stores nationwide.
It has differentiated itself in the fast-casual market by focusing on sustainability, convenience, and high-quality, healthy ingredients.
Empowering teams from the field to the support center
During a period of nationwide growth, the company’s People Services and Talent Engagement teams have worked to build a superior applicant experience while scaling to meet growing hiring needs, particularly in two of their key departments: the support center and the field team.
“Those in the field are making sure the restaurants are going, doors are open, and salads are being made,” said the Director of People Services. “But in the support center, we don’t consider ourselves ‘headquarters’ or ‘corporate’. Our job at the end of the day is to make sure our restaurants are supported in any shape or form.”
Finding a labor ATS to meet demand
In the race for top talent in the hourly space, hiring quality candidates quickly is crucial to a company’s growth and success. Prior to Fountain, the restaurant group had been using a legacy ATS to hire both salaried and hourly workers.
The legacy system’s limited automation and customization capabilities required hourly candidates to go through multiple rounds of interviews, causing a long time-to-hire.
“Fourteen days for time-to-hire was a long time. We also wanted to build reporting and to be able to understand our markets with more accuracy than we were previously able to do.”
"We needed a solution that could grow with us, and that our field team could easily use. They are not recruiters and don’t spend every day in these systems, so the more we can automate, the more effective usage and adoption we will have."
Customization within Fountain
Customization within Fountain is something the team was looking forward to trying out. Being able to customize workflows, specifically, has allowed the team to expedite their hiring process and reduce their time-to-hire by 70%.
“One of the great things is being able to reach out to our Fountain customer success managers and say, ‘Hey, we wish we could do this,’ and they just take it and figure it out,” said the Senior Manager of Talent Engagement. “That has been really amazing, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the fact that we can come in with all these asks and the Fountain team is ready to tackle that and take it as product feedback, as well.”
Prioritizing applicant experience through automation
Creating an excellent employee experience is paramount to the company’s mission for continued growth, and that starts with a seamless and engaging hiring process. The team has been able to use Fountain’s integrations to further simplify workflows, resulting in a smoother experience for the candidate.
“The product integrations that we have and the ability for us to automate a lot of the information we have coming from other systems—for me, it’s a no brainer—that’s a win”
Through integrations with partners like background check providers and identity verification services, Fountain helps the company automate mundane tasks, which has played a huge part in ensuring a seamless applicant experience. Candidates don’t have to wait days or weeks to hear about next steps; instead, they’re automatically pushed through the workflow depending on their qualifications. This quick turnaround keeps candidates engaged and gets them to their first day of work fast.
“Quickening the pace of the applicant journey is key to winning the speed-to-hire talent competition that's going on right now. We have one chance to make an amazing, brand-building first impression.”
Scaling growth with quality candidates
The restaurant brand started with one store in Washington, D.C., and has grown rapidly ever since. One of the major factors in its success has been finding hourly candidates who are skilled in the more hands-on cooking required for the field roles.
“We need to make sure that we’re constantly looking for opportunities to simplify the process,” said the Director of People Services, alluding to the disadvantage the company faces in needing to hire more skilled workers, due to a more complicated cooking process, than many other food chains. “The other element is, it’s a numbers game. If we continue to increase stores at pretty significant rates but our technology isn’t scalable, it’s not going to work.”
The organization rolled out Fountain in five stages across the nation, with New York as the last stop and making up about 60% of its portfolio. Since the area made up such a large percentage of its business, the team was able to customize the platform to fit their exact needs to ensure success.
“I can't imagine how we would scale without a tool like Fountain to help us do it. It really is set up for the type of hiring that we're doing today, and it's also just so flexible in terms of what we need and what we want to report on.”
Seamless recruiting with customizable workflows
The legacy ATS system the company had been using prior to Fountain was great for salaried candidates, but it didn’t allow the organization to customize what they needed to get hourly candidates hired quickly while also adhering to local compliances in different markets.
For hourly positions, “you don’t need to have these detailed interview panels,” said the Director of People Services. “You’ll need to really assess for competencies at the same level of scrutiny as you do for a corporate hire. In that sense, what you need to focus on is how you can ensure that the pipeline is as full as possible and that the experience is as smooth as possible.”
The team uses the Indeed integration within Fountain to help increase applicant volume, resulting in a 14% increase in hires per month.
Operating in 18 states comes with the challenge of making sure the company is meeting compliance requirements for each location. Fountain has allowed the team to create workflows that are specific to each location, thereby reducing the need for recruiters to manually add compliance information to individual job postings.
“With Fountain, we’ve reduced the number of manual steps and saved a lot of human hours, which is significant for our business.”
“There are nuances between markets, and we have some markets that are way more challenging than others,” said the Senior Manager of Talent Engagement. “That’s where that customization comes in. Specifically, having compliance-related types of customization as part of our applications has been incredibly helpful for the TA team and the People team to make sure that we are meeting those requirements for each of these states.”