Hey, Rally community! My name is Robbie Snelson, I am a relatively new Domino’s franchise owner, having acquired 7 stores in Birmingham, Alabama in September 2020 alongside my business partner. While my partner runs the “business” side of things, I am the “people person.” I’m focused on managing our hiring, training and retention efforts to ensure we have the best teams to delight our customers and provide them with exceptional service.
According to an article by CNBC, turnover in the fast food and restaurant industry can be as high as 130%! You read that right, some restaurants and fast food companies are turning over more than a full workforce every year. And this was certainly the experience we had when we took over the 7 franchises last year. That’s why I want to share my insights with all of you who also might be facing similar challenges with high-volume recruitment on how to use programmatic job advertising to help drive more applicants into your pipeline and reduce time to hire.
Using programmatic job advertising for high volume recruitment
When we took over the stores in September 2020, we were faced with multiple staffing challenges. First, we only had 100 employees between the 7 stores — which meant we were severely understaffed. We needed anywhere from 20-40 employees per store to be able to keep up with demand. Second, the vast majority of our existing employee base was brand new to Dominos — only 2 employees had been with the company for 6 months or more. That meant we also had to focus on our onboarding, training and retention efforts to meet our service goals quickly and help reduce turnover.
Because of the nature of the work, we often look to hire students and those looking for part-time work to fill our roles. However, this can present various challenges as students typically have classes to attend, or candidates have second jobs or other commitments, which means that we need a large number of employees to meet our scheduling demands to have adequate shift coverage. While some of our job postings were getting some traction, others were not, so I knew that we needed something to help us amplify our ads and increase our application flow. That’s why I turned to PandoLogic.
Before becoming a franchisee myself, I was a Franchise Business Consultant in Virginia, and one of the other franchisees I met during that time used PandoLogic and was seeing a lot of hiring success and recommended the tool to me. So by December 2020, we were up and running with the program, and we immediately began to see results. In fact, I remember seeing 97 applications come in when we first turned on the program!
How programmatic job advertising filled our talent pipeline
The first thing we analyzed for how to increase applicant flow was our job titles. The titles had to use keywords that our target candidates would be searching for. With PandoLogic, we’re able to post 3-4 different versions of our job posts, testing out different titles to get insight into which ones are working best to attract candidates.
For example, if we’re looking for a delivery driver, we might have one version marketed as “Pizza Delivery Driver” and another positioned as “Customer Service Delivery Driver.” We’ve seen great success with this approach as we’ve been able to take the data from PandoLogic and iterate on our job postings so they continue to improve over time.
Next, because some stores needed to make upwards of 40 hires, we implemented a location-targeting strategy. For example, if a store is close to a high school or college campus, we can target our posts by zip code to ensure we’re getting in front of the right audience.
Overall, what I love about using programmatic job advertising is how easy and efficient it is! PandoLogic takes care of everything for us through its AI and automation capabilities, which helps me be able to focus more time on improving our onboarding and training program and being able to give more dedicated 1-1 time with our new hires to ensure they have a positive experience and want to stick around with us long term.
How we improved our time to hire
With our stores understaffed, we needed to move quickly. So we configured PandoLogic’s system to send resumes directly to the store and me. We then invite candidates to the store for an interview, and have them complete an application while they’re there. The time from receiving a resume to inviting a candidate to an interview can happen within minutes!
What’s different about this approach compared to most stores is that typically a store will want a candidate to submit a resume and complete the application before coming in for an interview. For context, the Domino’s application asks candidates to provide information beyond their resume such as shift availability, driver’s license info and SSN. However, we’ve found that with our approach we’re actually able to get candidates through the door faster because having the candidates fill out an application online can actually turn some candidates away if they think the process will be too long and difficult — and in this market, we can’t afford to deter any talent!
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With the help of programmatic, we’ve been able to hire 125 new employees to date. Using a programmatic job advertising platform has been a game changer since it’s enabled us to surge our hiring efforts. And since the software automatically delivers ads through the most effective online channels, we know that we’re getting in front of the right candidates. With our continued focus on improving onboarding and training efforts once our new hires come through the door, we hope to create a more stable and sustainable recruitment and retention model to ensure long term success.