Build a Wildly Efficient Recruitment Process

Toward awesome work for all teams

Back when Nichole "Coco" Pahl was a web developer working on dynamic pricing for restaurants, she was known for putting butts in seats during off-peak hours. A natural-born efficiency addict, Coco's always on the hunt for ways to optimize the core processes that make a business tick.

But before long, Coco and her team started to see a new name in the restaurant biz, Waitr. Curious, her boss at the time reached out to Waitr CEO, Chris Meaux and the rest, as they say, is history. Waitr acquired Coco's former company and her role changed from managing web development to overseeing every aspect of product development as Product Manager for the popular carryout and delivery app. 👍

These days, Coco is a professional problem-solver working across a variety of teams to help solve pretty much any challenge the business is facing. One of which, was most definitely recruitment.

What was your recruitment process like in the pre-Breezy days?

Before Breezy, we didn't have an ATS. Each city was different. Some would receive an application and put it in an accordian file. Other markets had Google spreadsheets with an applicant on each line, you had to go in and update to change their status as you moved each applicant through the process. It was very manual.

The big turning point for us was Valentine's Day 2016. We got our butts handed to us. Our CEO even had to make a public apology. That was the moment we realized we needed to change our process.

Our city managers hire so many drivers each month — in August alone we hired 1,800 drivers. And it can be a high turnover position. We knew we needed to nurture our existing talent pool of drivers and cut down on churn. We now have a team dedicated to business intelligence (BI) and we spend a lot of time predicting when we'll need to ramp up our hiring efforts — especially around the holidays.

Why is it important for your company to create an awesome experience for candidates?

One of our biggest competitive advantages is our driver base. We're proud of the people we hire.

We make sure we have an in-person interview with each candidate. As part of our Breezy initiative, we took our 2-hour long in-person training and assessment course for candidates and moved it to a learning management system (LMS), so they could hit the ground running.

From the very beginning, our goal was to make the recruitment process as efficient as possible so we knew we needed an ATS that would let us build additional automation features.

With Breezy, we can automatically create accounts for drivers in our payroll system, shift scheduling service, driver system, LMS, and automatically order their background check. We can even allow them to self-schedule their own interviews.

What are the recruitment and hiring workflows where you see teams using Breezy?

The automated emails received when an applicant or candidate enters a new stage of the process have saved our team a ton of time. Those alone save our city managers precious time previously spent on copy/pasting.

Our best candidates come from our our website. Rather than relying on the job boards where anyone and everyone can apply, we leveraged Breezy's API to create a fully customized career portal on our website.

I also love having the ability to submit feature requests in Breezy. My mission is to reduce inefficiencies in our entire recruitment process company-wide and it's so great to know what features are being worked on and what's coming up!

How much time does Breezy save you overall (pre-Breezy vs. now)?

When you account for the time saved on emailing, tracking, generating accounts, ordering background checks, and moving our training online it saves us ~2.5hrs.

Our goal is to decrease the amount of time is takes our city managers to interview, hire, and onboard each candidate to 15 minutes and we're getting close to that.

What other metrics do you use to track your recruitment efficiency?

Time to hire is a big one for us but it's a little difficult to track.

We always look at this because we're always hiring more drivers. We use Breezy to hire for both corporate positions and driver positions and right now time to hire is about 1 week for a driver hire compared to about 100 days for an engineering position.

Do you have any personal passions or side projects most people might not know about?

Getting rid of inefficiencies! Whether it’s in our product, customer support process, driver assignments, or any other function of our company, I want our entire product suite to be as streamlined as possible.