How do you acquire the best employees, not just the best applicants?
With more than 5,000 employees in over 80 locations, Rock Bottom Restaurants knew all too well the problems associated with hiring hourly workers. The company was flooded with paper employment applications that were often hard to read and even harder to organize. In addition, the arduous task of interviewing each and every potential employee was tapping into their managers’ valuable time.
That’s why two years ago the company turned to Unicru, Inc., a provider of automated hiring systems, to handle its hourly applicant tracking and assessments. Unicru is one of a number of outfits, like the Taleo Corporation and Deploy Solutions, that help companies streamline their hiring process by allowing potential employees to apply for a job electronically rather than with the paper applications of old. After just a few months of using the Unicru system, Doug Nelson, training and development manager for Rock Bottom Restaurants, says the company started seeing results in the form of a reduction in its high turnover rates—one of the biggest problems in foodservice.
Major retailers have been using automated hiring technology for quite some time; in the restaurant world, casual concepts are fairly new to it, and quick-serves haven’t yet embraced it to any great degree. There’s a good chance they will, though.
“The quick-serve world is a world of urgency,” says Mel Kleiman, a human resources consultant. “When a position opens in the kitchen, it has to be filled immediately, and all too often, that means companies are forced to hire the best applicant, not the best employee.” Automated hiring systems, Kleiman says, can eliminate that problem by increasing applicant flow, as they allow potential employees to apply for a job in at least one of three ways: at electronic kiosks on location, on the web, or over the phone with an interactive voice response system.
The application process itself consists of two parts: a pre-screen and an assessment. The pre-screen is used to weed out candidates by asking questions about their age and what days and shifts they can work. “If an employee passes the pre-screen, then they are allowed to go on to the next set of questions,” says Diane Perdee, vice president of corporate communications for Taleo. “If they don’t, a message comes up that politely says, ‘Thank you for applying, but you don’t meet all the criteria required for this position.’” Kleiman says at one casual dining chain in New Mexico and Arizona, up to 49 percent of applicants answered “No” to the question, “Do you have a legal right to work in this country?”
The assessment part of the application provides managers with the results of skills, personality, attitude, and honesty tests, developed by industrial organizational psychologists, so they are better able to choose the best candidate for the job.
According to Kleiman, an automated hiring system costs about $50,000 to $100,000 to implement, with an ongoing fee of about $25 per month per location (about $300 per location per year). The return on investment, however, can be as high as four to one over a three-year period, he says. Some of those numbers can be attributed to the increase in the Work Opportunity Tax Credits (WOTC) a company can gain by tailoring the system to favor a worker that will earn them a tax credit when all other qualifications are equal. He says at one company with over 160 locations and some 12,000 employees, WOTC went from $35,000 per month with the manual application system to $50,000 per month with an automated system. When you consider that the cost of the system was only $33,000 per month, those numbers can be pretty compelling.
For more information, visit Unicru (www.unicru.com), Taleo (www.taleo.com), and/or Deploy Solutions (www.deploy.com).
The last issue of QSR's Best Practices e-newsletter incorrectly identified Mike Green as president of Speedmark Information Services. Scott Hiller is president; Green is vice president. There is also an alternate address for the company's web site: www.speedmarkweb.com.
