Four years ago, the footwear retailer partnered with SmartRecruiters to develop a custom implementation strategy that would empower them to tackle high-volume seasonal hiring and industry challenges.

After finding success implementing SmartRecruiters at their Manhattan Beach headquarters, Skechers had the ambitious goal to roll out SmartRecruiters in all 727 of their stores within 90 days. The purpose was to standardize their hiring process and provide a consistent candidate experience regardless of location. With the holiday season fast approaching, the pressure to implement a new system before the hiring demand spike was on. SmartRecruiters’ Hiring Success team was up to the challenge, and started the process by breaking out the process into five steps:

1. Awareness ― Understanding goals and defining metrics to measure success
2. Roadmap ― Establishing a plan to reach objectives
3. Re-optimization Workshop ― Redesigning the hiring process and providing sustainable supporting configuration for Skechers’ main points of contact 
4. Acceleration ― Implementing everything configured in the workshop and preparing Skechers’ trainers for their three-month training roadshow to teach all hiring managers how to use the new system effectively
5. Optimization ― Reviewing the metrics and achievements of retail stores on a monthly basis 

The results speak for themselves, with a 100% launch in all of Skechers’ stores after 90 days. Additionally, hiring teams readily embraced the platform, with over 80% of the entire organization’s TA department using the new system immediately after implementation. The modern and uniform hiring process also translated to a significant increase in applications, with more than 50,000 applications for 1,400 jobs, which led directly to 525 new hires. To us, that is the definition of Hiring Success.

SmartRecruiters sat down with Adan Villalobos, Global Director of Talent Acquisition at Skechers, to look back on these accomplishments. Adan dove deep into what it felt like to participate in the monumental changes of Skechers’s global hiring process.

What did you find to be some key benefits from the re-optimization workshop? 

It was incredibly helpful to have an expert show us the technical side of how we should be setting up the system. We realized during this stage that SmartRecruiters had so many different processes and systems that we weren’t even utilizing. We discovered how to operate the system on a global level, and were then able to come together and build a training program for our hiring managers. This step was crucial to prepare us for the global rollout. 

What were your biggest concerns while on the road during Skechers’ store rollout?

Initially, my biggest concern in rolling this out to stores was that we would have to pull hiring managers away from the sales floor to teach them the system. However, SmartRecruiters is so mobile and intuitive that it was possible to have short training sessions and then send hiring managers out to use the platform on their phones on the sales floor. Once they learned of this ability it gave them the opportunity to streamline the entire hiring process while also providing a great candidate experience. 

We were also somewhat worried about adoption rates, but the training programs that we built with SmartRecruiters encouraged all participants to buy into the system because they saw how it was going to benefit them in the long run. It was easy to see how, by using the platform, they were going to achieve top-quality hires, which meant an increase in the overall profitability of their store.

How do you sustain the success that you’ve seen with the engagement and adoption in each store?

Many of us have been in a business where a new system is rolled out, it’s bright and shiny for the first three to six months, and then it loses its luster. To avoid this, we wanted to create programs that support SmartRecruiters’ system and also sustain the great results we initially saw. In order to achieve this, we made district managers and regional managers accountable for managing the platform in all stores. This allowed them to truly own the program, and it was in their best interest to utilize it to the best of their ability.

We also built a recruiting ambassador program. Each recruiting ambassador was assigned to a district to help stores actively recruit through the platform and make sure that they’re utilizing it to its full potential. SmartRecruiters also does a great job of continuing to update the platform, and this keeps our people very involved. 

How can SmartRecruiters help clients be successful with high-volume hiring in retail?

The SmartRecruiters team has always helped build our strategy for the peak periods of hiring during the holidays and the back-to-school season. They have achieved this by showing us how to use the platform as a marketing tool. 

It gives stores an opportunity to market to career fairs and at in-store events. The hiring manager can then create candidate pools from the people they reach and benchmark the candidates already in the system. When the store is ready to hire for a specific season the hiring managers can go back into the system and identify the best candidates for interviews. Overall, our planning and communication throughout the hiring process have improved, and so has our capability to deal with the masses of candidates each season.

Through strategic planning and partnership, Skechers received a tailored implementation program that produced dramatic results and has the roadmap to continually attract, select, and hire great talent for years to come. To hear the full Q&A session check out the Webinar: Building a Business Case for Hiring Success in Retail where our Hiring Success director breaks down process that led to this incredible transformation.

SmartRecruiters prides itself on providing bespoke solutions to our customers’ recruiting challenges. The flexibility of our Talent Acquisition Suite means it can be easily applied to a variety of situations and demands, as well as integrate a wide variety of additional tools and features. So whether you’re recruiting globally, locally, in high volume or low, SmartRecruiters will give you the tools you need to achieve Hiring Success.

However, don’t just take our word for it. Below are links to summaries of our various customer case studies. Each one examines a particular SmartRecruiters customer, the recruitment challenges they faced, and how the SmartRecruiters ATS helped to overcome them.

How DFC Left The Dark Ages And Saved 900 Work Hours A Week

Financial giant DFC was trying to recruit for a global company with nothing but spreadsheets and email chains. Here’s how SmartRecruiters introduced them to high-tech hiring.

Equinox: Hiring the Best Personal Trainers for Every Fitness Club

Equinox relies on finding the best and most experienced trainers out there, and who better to recruit great trainers than great trainers themselves? With SmartRecruiters’ in-built collaborative features, Equinox could involve its expert professionals in every stage of the hiring process.

Brightsparks: How Recruiting Agency Uses Technology to go “Beyond the Resume”

Brightsparks needed a way to entice the time and technology conscious Generation Z. SmartRecruiters allowed them to easily create the employer brand they wanted to espouse and make it easy for busy students to apply.

IGI Sharpens Its Focus On Successful Recruiting

Audio-visual developer IGI may be at the forefront of video technology, but their recruitment was still relying on filing cabinets. That’s until SmartRecruiters helped them develop a system and brand that matched their own products.

Scality: Powering 100% Year-Over-Year Growth with Great Hiring Quality

Scality wanted to ensure it found the best professionals out there by using a long and multi-faceted recruitment process. Unfortunately, their first attempts resulted in ‘spreadsheet madness’. SmartRecruiters on the other hand allows them to easily create a clear standard process which could include all their technical expertise.

How Pluralsight Regained Perfect Hiring Vision with SmartRecruiters

Pluralsight was expanding, and needed to recruit fast. A slow legacy system was letting them down, allowing great candidates to slip through the net and buckling under their demands. Luckily, SmartRecruiters provided the streamlined and scalable platform they needed.

Christian Brothers Automotive: Growing a strong franchise by growing strong teams

As a successful franchise, Christian Brothers favored a decentralized hiring approach that let local store managers becoming recruiters. Unfortunately, their legacy tech was cumbersome and unwieldy to operate. SmartRecruiters allowed managers to quickly and easy put on a recruiter hat, meaning they could spend more time dealing with customers and not clunky ATS.

Colliers International: Closes more deals with stronger candidates

Recruitment at Colliers was tedious. What made it worse was that previous candidates and recruitment efforts went unrecorded, wasting time and resources that could be applied to future searches. SmartRecruiters turned that around and introduced a quick, easy and robust system – saving time, money and stress.

Expeditors: Lean Resources. Global Footprint. Robust Results

Expeditors chaotic system of emails and spreadsheets was damaging their candidate experience and brand, counting them untold potential great hires. SmartRecruiters revolutionized that and allowed Expeditors to project the image both it, and its candidates, wanted.

Gameloft: Finding The Best Candidates The World Over

With offices in over 30 countries, Gameloft knew it needed to rely on local recruiters to find local talent. However, in a vast company, you also need standardized practises and standards. SmartRecruiters provided the tools to allow a global company to recruit locally.

Indigo: Recruiting Platform Adds Joy to Customer and Employee Experience

Indigo knows happy workers make customers. The first step to creating a happy staff is to make sure they have a great candidate experience when applying. SmartRecruiters let Indigo develop their brand, send jobs to the boards and platforms they wanted, and bring in the large numbers needed to fill seasonal vacancies. All from one platform.

With 89 superstores and 124 smaller shops, Indigo is Canada’s largest book, gift and speciality retailer. With a business that big, it is clear recruitment has to be conducted via a decentralized hiring model.

Indigo currently boasts a staff of 6,100 with the retailer taking on around 4,000 new hires every year. All together, this mighty team brought in almost a billion dollars in 2016.

The requirement to find additional staff quickly and easily, especially for seasonal periods, is therefore central to Indigo’s success. However, they soon discovered this task was far above-and-beyond their legacy applicant tracking system.

Working With A Joyless ATS

Initially, Indigo hoped to jury-rig their older Taleo platform in order to meet their newer, more strenuous, demands. However, as Indigo’s Director of Talent Acquisition and Performance Management Sarah Wilson explains, it quickly became apparent this would not work:

“The costs of an initiative like that with an extensive set of new requirements would have been cost prohibitive, so we began evaluating other solutions.”

Furthermore, the legacy software did not match the image they wished to project, resulting in a poor candidate experience and potentially poorer quality candidates. Indigo firmly believes joyful employees make joyful customers, but their hiring process was not conducive to this. Luckily, Sarah Wilson recognized the problem and understood something had to be done, adding:

“During that process it became clearer than ever that our decentralized model – and the need to fill 4,000 jobs per year – required an entirely new solution.”

Happy Staff Making Happy Customers

With SmartRecruiters, Indigo found a new talent acquisition suite which fulfilled their demands for large scale, decentralized hiring. Sarah highlighted the following ways SmartRecruiters helped them achieve their goals:

• Although SmartRecruiters allowed integrations with almost any tool, the pre-configured settings and ease of use means the platform can be easily picked up by store managers in both their larger and smaller stores.
• The constant and concise reporting of data allowed Indigo to experiment with their recruiting strategies, allowing the company to be more innovative in candidate sourcing.
• The collaborative features of SmartRecruiters also allowed for decentralized hiring within stores, resulting in happier candidates and staff.
• The ability to source candidates outside of traditional job boards, such as via referrals or their own career page, meant Indigo were able to reduce their hiring costs. Eventually over 50% of applicants would come via these channels.

The Results Speak For Themselves

With SmartRecruiters, Indigo saw immediate improvements. Sarah reveals that 44% of potential candidates who see an Indigo posting click on it, while 88% of that number will complete the application. This allowed Indigo to fulfill their 2016 holiday season hiring goals two weeks ahead of schedule.

Indigo also conducted an internal survey of recently hired employees to gauge their experiences, and the results were rather impressive. Here are just some of them:

• 92% agreed that job postings were clear and provided relevant information about the opportunity
• Ÿ95% agreed that the recruiter communicated in a professional and timely manner
• 96% rated the candidate experience at Indigo as “great” or “excellent”
• Ÿ99% would refer others for employment opportunities at Indigo

To see those results in full, as well as read the full experience of Indigo with SmartRecruiters, head over to our special case study, Recruiting Platform Adds Joy to Customer and Employee Experience.

Gameloft‘s profile is filled with some pretty astronomical numbers, which isn’t that surprising when you consider it is the world’s largest publisher of mobile and video games. With 3 million daily downloads, 140 million monthly users and 2016 sales of $256 million, Gameloft clearly doesn’t do things on a small scale.

However, that’s not the end of Gameloft’s impressive haul of integers, as all this progress was made thanks to 6,000 employers in 48 offices in 30 countries. That means there’s barely a time zone without a Gameloft office.

Recruiting Locally, Globally

Since Gameloft has spread into diverse and myriad countries, it needed a way to ensure standardized recruitment processes across all its offices, while simultaneously allowing for flexibility on the local scale.

Unfortunately, the applicant tracking system that may have served Gameloft in the early years wasn’t up to the task of hiring both  globally AND locally. Furthermore, a drawn out and convoluted recruitment process could have been deterring countless talented candidates. As Gameloft HR Manager Romain Delebecque explains:

“Whether hiring a software architect in Romania or a game designer in Vietnam, we need to make sure that the application process is smooth and represents a company that the best developers in the world want to work for — in any office worldwide.”

That’s why, in 2016, Gameloft found a new solution: SmartRecruiters.

Global Data All In One Place

SmartRecruiters’ Talent Acquisition Platform provided the ideal response to the needs of an expanding, global company. Here are just some of the ways how:

• SmartRecruiters is localized in 16 user languages and 35 candidate facing ones, allowing Gameloft’s diverse recruiters and candidates to communicate clearly in their native languages.
• Clear and concise reporting, applicant tracking and data-backed metrics provides both recruiters with unprecedented visibility. No more lengthy email chains asking for updates or information, it’s all available on one dashboard. As Delebecque says, for a global recruiter “it’s all about the data.”
• SmartRecruiters allows for additional tools and infrastructure to be easily integrated into the platform. This promotes local flexibility and means recruiters spend more time assessing candidates and less time navigating clunky software.
• The ease of use of SmartRecruiters for both users and candidates, including one click applications, means Gameloft can cultivate a positive candidate experience that best matches the innovativeness of their company.

To hear more from Romain Delebecque, read SmartRecruiters’ full Gameloft case study:  Hire the world’s best talent in 30 countries? Game on!

Over the past 30 years, DFC Global Corp has become one of the world’s leading providers of accessible consumer finance services, taking the lead in serving unbanked, underbanked and small business owners across the world.

With around 1,000 branches in seven countries and a staff of 6,500 members, DFC recruiters require a tool which can assist and support the quantity of candidates they expect, especially when you consider the company favors a high-volume model headed up by only six recruiters working in close cooperation with local managers.

Tangled In The Spreadsheet Quagmire

To deal with this task, the North American division of DFC established the North American Talent Acquisition Center of Excellence in 2014 – a group designed to find the best candidates and ensure DFC maintained its high level of staffing.

Up until the creation of this group, DFC had been relying purely on rudimentary email and excel spreadsheets, creating a vast and unnavigable administrative mess which Jason Fisher, the Director of North American Talent Acquisition, likened to ‘the dark ages’.

As well as being antiquated in approach, this method was also incredibly time consuming and inefficient. Recruiters would be spending many more hours than necessary in their hunts and were still not finding the best candidates at the end of it all.

Faced with this, Jason and his team created a set of specifications any new adopted system would have to satisfy. Firstly, it should be easy to pick up and use, secondly it should be flexible in terms of integrations, and finally it should provide additional analytics, metrics and data so the recruitment efforts could be properly scrutinized and analyzed.

A Platform That Meets All Specifications

With SmartRecruiters, DFC found a solution which perfectly matched their requirements. Here’s how:

• SmartRecruiters’ integrated assessments means recruiters only had to deal with applications that passed a certain criteria. This meant they spent less time sifting through resumes attached to emails, and more time working with the most promising candidates.
• The flexibility of SmartRecruiters’ APIs means it can be easily integrated with DFC’s existing or desired tools, such as Cornerstone Insights.
• SmartRecruiters comes pre-packaged with a suite of analytical tools providing recruiters with a wide range of metrics. This can allow them to conduct testing on their sourcing and processes, potentially allowing for savings in terms of time and recruitment costs.
• The ability to quickly and easily collaborate within the SmartRecruiters platform ultimately allows for higher quality hires and an end to lengthy email chains.

As a result of working with SmartRecruiters, DFC saw major positive changes in its recruitment process, in particular regarding efficiency . They now save 900 work hours per week compared to their time in the ‘dark ages’, while the metrics and additional tools have reduced administrative costs to the equivalent of 200 hours per week.

Additionally, the number of qualified candidates DFC receives rose by 30%.

Thanks to this success with the North American division, SmartRecruiters has been rolled out in all DFC branches in the UK.

To find out more about how SmartRecruiters revolutionized DFC’s recruitment, check out the dedicated case study: DFC Leaves The Dark Ages.

With around 80 locations across the US, Canada and Europe, Equinox has become the benchmark for high quality gym and fitness clubs around the globe. Central to the companies philosophy is creating bespoke experiences with their customers, providing ample face-to-face time with highly trained expert professionals.

Hiring success for this kind of human-centric business is therefore of critical importance. The employees and their knowledge are the very product Equinox is selling and to achieve this they need to find and hire the best people and best experts possible.

Equinox uses a decentralized system which local branch managers conduct their own hiring based on their requirements. This approach utilizes around 20 full-time recruiters supported by over 300 local hiring managers who may often carry out many other activities on a daily basis.

How To Ensure Consistent Excellence?

Although this approach provides the flexibility local managers need to keep their branches staffed, it also comes packaged with some inherent challenges. Most importantly is the concern a highly decentralized approach will suffer from a lack of consistency in the long-run.

The high quality standards customers have come to expect are central to Equinox’s brand and business. Several, or perhaps even a single, poor hire in one branch could potentially cause ongoing brand problems, especially considering they primarily court luxury customers with high demands.

Another issue concerns the tools Equinox needs to fulfil this hiring goal. The core strength and value of the company comes from the knowledge of its trainers and professionals in relation to their chosen speciality. It’s unlikely this professional knowledge will be possessed by full-time recruiters and hiring managers. Therefore, it makes sense for Equinox to allow its trainers, nutritionists and instructors to be involved in the hiring process. For this to be effective, they need to have access to an easy to use platform that economises their time. After all, the last thing an Equinox trainer wants to do is spend hours trying to work with clunky software in a backroom.

Turning Your Experts Into Hiring Managers

To solve this problem, Equinox joined SmartRecruiters in 2013. Here’s why they haven’t looked back:

• SmartRecruiters has collaboration as a keystone of the platform, allowing hiring managers from across the country to conveniently discuss candidates. This was particularly useful for Equinox, since knowledge from other branches could be brought into the hiring process if it was not available locally.
• The platform is also incredibly flexible and mobile, allowing trainers-cum-hiring managers to recruit on the move, saving them vast amounts of time and allowing them to concentrate on other daily responsibilities.
• The use of SmartRecruiters’ customizable scorecards allows for a consistent assessment process to be used across the company. This ensures local managers, while having the freedom to work on their own, also adhere to the high quality standards demanded.
• All of these factors, combined with SmartRecruiters’ support for social media and one-click-applications, results in a great candidate experience which supports the brand Equinox wishes to project.

After teaming up with SmartRecruiters, Equinox quickly saw an increase in applications — to the tune of 45 percent. Additionally, they saw an increase of 9 percent in terms of new hires, while 80 percent of individuals who saw a job posting applied to it.

To find out more about how Equinox found hiring success with SmartRecruiters, check out the full case study, Equinox: Hiring The Best Personal Trainers For Every Fitness Club.

If you attended university in the United Kingdom, you’ve almost certainly heard of Brightsparks. In fact it’s highly plausible you could be one of the 14,000 students they have worked with every year since starting in 2003.

Headquartered in London, Brightsparks specializes in placing UK students into both temporary employment during their studies, and entry-level graduate positions afterwards. As their Senior Talent Manager Jake Wibberly reveals, Brightsparks wants to approach their work differently from other temporary employment agencies, building long-term relationships with their candidates:

“This is quite a unique niche. We get to know students very well as we screen them, assess them, and gather feedback after placing them into roles with our clients, so we can gather deep insights into their personalities and skills.”

Appealing To Generation Z

This approach is not without major challenges, especially when working with students who may have little or no job experience. Traditional CVs and application processes are of little value, and with Brightsparks dealing with such a large number of applicants, they need standardized processes to ensure efficient and fair placements.

Then there’s finding the students in the first place. Generation Z has a disdain for the older, lengthier application processes of previous decades. University is a busy time with essays to finish, societies to join and — let’s face it — copious amounts of partying to fit in. With this in mind, Brightsparks needed a quick and easy process that would appeal to students AND give their hiring managers the data they required.

Building Long-Term Relationships With Candidates

In 2016, Brightsparks discovered that SmartRecruiters offered the solutions to all of these concerns, and more. Let’s see how:

• SmartRecruiters’ easy-to-configure dashboard allowed Brightsparks to develop standardized tests for candidates. Not only did this provide them with all the data they needed, it also helped reduce bias and increase diversity.
• Candidate profiles provides the ability to track students throughout their entire relationship with Brightsparks, allowing long-term monitoring of their data and experience. This means a profile created for a temporary job can be updated and later used for finding a graduate position.
• SmartRecruiters’ flexible API allows it to seamlessly post to multiple social media platforms, a critical advantage when attempting to source younger candidates. Additionally, the ease of click-and-go applications further appeals to time-pressed students.
• The data reports and metrics at the core of SmartRecruiters’ platform allows Brightsparks to quickly assess a large number of candidates and effectively analyze their sourcing channels, saving them money and giving them an edge over their competitors.

IGI is one of the leading advanced visualization and commercial audio-visual applications in the United States. Based out of Commerce, IGI works with a diverse variety of industries, including cinematic post-production, military and intelligence, engineering and oil and gas exploration.

When you’re dealing with such precise industries in a constantly evolving technology environment, anything less than excellence simply won’t do — and to achieve excellence, you need excellent employees.

That’s why, in 2012, IGI became an early adopter of SmartRecruiters’ talent acquisition software.

Moving Beyond Filing Cabinets and Emails

IGI’s organization presents some interesting recruitment challenges. As Director of Marketing Paul Helm explains, they are a specialist company within an highly specialized industry:

“In many ways, it’s especially challenging at IGI because we’re not a typical audio visual company, but recognized more as specialists in a very narrow niche of that industry called advanced visualization. Because we design, engineer, build and maintain such highly complex systems, we require highly specialized talent.”

Even though IGI only needed to fill a small number of positions at any particular time, their legacy ATS didn’t provide the support to find the expert talent they required. In particular, there was no simple way to closely compare candidates, and they still relied on filing cabinets and messy email folders to record and retain candidate information.

This situation was made even more cumbersome when you realize IGI employees often have to wear many different hats spanning departments and disciplines.

Turning Your Entire Expert Team Into Hiring Managers

IGI quickly realized that SmartRecruiters was the platform they needed, helping them to get ahead with hiring the best talent in a specialized and competitive industry. Here’s how SmartRecruiters turned IGI’s hiring processes around:

• SmartRecruiters allows for rapid and easy sourcing over a wide variety of job boards and social media platforms. This means you’re always in the prime position to find that expert you’re looking for, wherever they may be.
• The built-in collaborative features of SmartRecruiters allowed IGI to pool the expertise of all of their staff into the hiring process — an important advantage in a highly specialized industry. Furthermore, SmartRecruiters allows easy integration of other applications, so collaborators could continue to use established tools of their trade.
• With IGI employees taking on many diverse roles, Paul Helm highlighted SmartRecruiters’ ease of use as an important element. Employees with little or no recruiting experience could be part of the process with no need for extensive training.
• Online candidate profiles means recruiters can quickly and easily contact anyone who has ever applied through the SmartRecruiters platform. No need for those cumbersome filing cabinets or spreadsheets.

Paul Helm had much more to say about how SmartRecruiters helps companies like IGI achieve their hiring goals. Make sure to catch all the details over at our case study, IGI: Advanced Visualization solutions technology integrator sharpens its focus on successful recruiting.

After breaking into the market in 2009, Scality quickly established itself as a world leader in object and cloud storage, working with around half a billion end users and some of the US’ most prominent companies, including Comcast and Time Warner.

What’s even more impressive is the fact Scality achieved all this with a relatively tiny staff. They had only 50 employees when starting out in 2009, increasing to around 200 in 2017. This reflects one important aspect of Scality’s hiring philosophy: quality over quantity.

Furthermore, in Scality’s business, quality is of utmost importance. Data storage is a big responsibility, with clients demanding a competent and professional partner they can trust to keep their data safe. Therefore, Scality can only afford to hire individuals who match their competency, company culture and professionalism.

Dealing With Brand-Destroying Tech

Attracting this kind of talent is no simple feat, while Scality’s small team also means each hire is of critical importance as hiring the wrong person could have dire ramifications.  Scality President and COO Erwan Menard explains:

“Just one hiring mistake can bring painful consequences that can add up to millions of dollars in lost opportunities.”

To ensure they only take on the best candidates, Scality must utilize a lengthy hiring process featuring deep collaboration between many different individuals. However, organizing such a system comes with its own issues, with Menard claiming their initial attempts at a homegrown system ended in everyone’s administrative nightmare: “spreadsheet madness”.

Furthermore, although the jobs Scality advertized required high levels of technical skill and professionalism, their job postings did not match this, creating a poor brand image that would dissuade the very people they were looking for from applying. Scality recruiter Eléonore Charles adds:

“It’s easy to forget that one person in the hiring process remains essential … the candidate. The very best candidates are in high demand and would view older technologies and processes as a red flag for joining a firm like ours.”

Curing Spreadsheet Madness

The flexibility of the SmartRecruiters talent acquisition suite means it’s equally effective for quickly staffing a new, expanding company, or  creating deep, lengthy and precisely engineered hiring processes. Here’s how:

• At its core, SmartRecruiters is a platform for hiring collaboration, allowing teams of various sizes to closely cooperate on the hiring process. Vital information is available instantaneously to anyone who requires it, while each member of the team can track, comment upon and rate candidates without the need for lengthy email chains or spreadsheets.
• SmartRecruiters also allows hiring teams to create personalized scorecards with which to closely assess potential candidates. This allows companies such as Scality, to rate candidates on the same criteria, resulting in an easy to digest and gauge company-wide opinion polls.
• Through built-in integrations, SmartRecruiters can quickly and painlessly post job advertisements to social media platforms and job boards. What’s more, one click applications creates a great candidate experience, creating an innovative hiring brand that matches Scality’s company culture.

Would you like to know more? Make sure to read the full case study, Scality: Powering 100% Year-Over-Year Growth with Great Hiring Quality.

In 1982, Mark Carr noticed a gap in the automotive market: good, honest repairs which put the customer first. With this in mind, and using the founding principle “love thy neighbor as yourself” as a guide, he set about creating what would become one of the most successful franchises in the United States, Christian Brothers Automotives.

Today, Carr has franchised the company, and its principles, to around 165 branches in 22 states. Central to Christian Brothers’ success is its devotion to providing fair and honest services to their customers, and this is something Carr also extends to his employees. Unusually, Carr only takes his portion of a franchised stores’ income once they have paid all their other expenses, including wages and health insurance. This results in stronger stores, happier staff and ultimately happier customers.

As a result of this approach, Christian Brothers has a 100% success rate with its new franchised locations, making it into Entrepreneur Magazine’s 2016 list of best franchise opportunities.

A Legacy Platform That Can’t Keep Up

Carr permits his franchised outlets a lot of autonomy, including in recruitment. Instead of directing from above, Christian Brothers has a team of recruiters who can advise local branch managers when required. However, as Christian Brothers Director of Recruiting, Matt Miller, explains, there are potential issues with this approach – especially if your tech isn’t up to scratch:

“We thrive on finding people dedicated to excellence, but we struggled when we were using an older legacy applicant tracking system. With limited functionality, it was challenging for busy store owners to manage all of their recruiting efforts, monitor spend, and source candidates while at the same time running their day-to-day business.”

This issue of time is particularly important to Christian Brothers, as their brand depends on having face-to-face time with customers. Managers and staff can’t provide this level of care if they also have to hide away in backrooms sifting through applications.

An ATS Which Supports Your Brand

In order to find a way to maximise the efficiency of their hiring efforts, Christian Brothers set up trials in five locations with various applicant tracking systems. After the trial concluded, four of the five branches claimed SmartRecruiters was the ATS they wanted to use. Here’s why:

• SmartRecruiters has been built with the user in mind, features a navigable interface that can be picked up quickly, regardless of the user’s technical skills.
• The streamlined platform allows recruiters, or acting recruiters, to efficiently move candidates through the process. This fluid design, coupled with instantaneous access to communication tools, saves time that can be spent elsewhere.
• SmartRecruiters easily integrates a number of social networks, providing wide reach for even small local branches with little effort.
• All this allowed Christian Brothers to create personalized, branded job postings that appealed to their ideals as well as the best candidates out there.

The Results Are Clear

After using SmartRecruiters, Christian Brothers saw a 30% increase in applications. This allowed them to rapidly staff new branches and make hires within days.

Christian Brothers Automotive is frequently cited in various ‘best place to work’ lists, and although SmartRecruiters can’t take all the credit for this, the ease and flexibility of the platform must surely be a contributing factor.

Read more about Christian Brothers Automotive and SmartRecruiters’ partnership in the case study: Christian Brothers: Growing a strong franchise by growing strong teams – in every store.