Fountain enables 59% decrease in talent acquisition costs for on-demand delivery service

With Fountain, a national grocery-delivery service has optimized hiring to serve more consumers across the country

100,000

Applications per month

Geographic growth in one year

305%

$3.2million

Saved in talent acquisition costs

10%

Annual cost savings

Logistics: The backbone of the global economy

Online shopping (or ecommerce) has skyrocketed in recent years and shows no signs of slowing down. As a result, the demands on the logistics industry are soaring right alongside consumer demands, putting pressure on supply, shipping, and transportation companies to get goods to their customers faster than their competitors.

Logistics teams must lean into the volatility of the industry by keeping their facilities well-staffed and by filling positions quickly as consumer behavior changes. As ecommerce continues its global upward trajectory, companies look to Fountain to find, hire, and retain qualified workers and keep engines running.

Bottlenecks in the hiring funnel

The ebbs and flows of the logistics industry have left recruiters reeling to find and hire workers. In the case of a grocery delivery service that reaches more than 5,000 cities nationwide, the time and effort they dedicated to hiring didn’t always result in successful matriculation.

Before Fountain was implemented at this company, applicants were frequently sitting idle between the data collection stage and the background check, or they were dropping off altogether. With a growing number of applicants each week, performing manual background checks was becoming time- and cost-prohibitive.

“We used to background-check every single applicant,” said the company’s operations coordinator. “With COVID-19, we had to stop and think: We’re hiring 100,000 workers per month. We cannot physically back- ground-check every single one and then have them not work.”

Process customization leads to quick cost- cutting

Fountain’s interface and integrations enabled the delivery company to mitigate these problems in two ways. First, the talent acquisition (TA) team took advantage of Fountain’s drag-and-drop workflow editor to rearrange their application stages without the need to involve IT. The qualification stage now appears
only after the applicant pool has been refined to a qualified candidate list.

“That has saved us, just in the last year, about $3.2 million”

Second, they took advantage of Fountain’s open API to seamlessly integrate
with partner Checkr to run background checks after applicants are approved.
These changes have led to a 59% reduction in talent acquisition cost.

Key Features

• Drag-and-drop workflow
editor

“Now, until they sign into our app to start working, they don’t undergo a
background check,” the operations coordinator said. “That has saved us,
just in the last year, about $3.2 million” in talent acquisition costs.

• Opening Clones

• Bulk edits

• Asynchronous video
screens

Bulk edits and cloning enable faster growth

Moving background checks to the end of the process wasn’t the only change
the company made to optimize their hiring funnel; they also shifted the data
collection stage to the front of the pipeline to collect more of the applicant’s
information upfront:

“We swapped stages around within the funnels so that we could be more
efficient as a team and get applicants through the platform quicker. Now,
we do all of our collection upfront so that we can review [the applicants]
and approve them as soon as we have a need that week or the next week.”

Within Fountain, talent acquisition teams can make bulk edits to applicant
pools and clone stages, which has allowed this grocery delivery company to
manage their 350+ unique workflows and to adjust these workflows based on
regional requirements as they grow.

“Being able to clone things makes it easier to expand into new markets,”
the company’s operations coordinator said.

In 2017, the grocery delivery service was active in 82 markets, which more han tripled in 2018 to 250 markets. Today, workers are active in 299 markets
and counting.

Integrations Used

As the company grew, in-person interviews became unsustainable. It wasn’t
long after the founding of the company that the recruitment team transitioned
to virtual interviews. Fountain helped by consolidating video interviews onto
one platform and refined the process further by allowing for asynchronous
vide recordings.

Now, instead of spending time coordinating schedules and meeting for half
an hour, applicants simply record themselves stating basic information about
their identity in just a few minutes, which not only saves time for both applicants and recruiters but also helps prevent unverifiable applicants from moving
forward through the process.

A streamlined and seamless future

When the time came to renew their contract with Fountain, the delivery
company chose to continue managing their hiring processes in one place:

“We wanted everything to be streamlined into one platform so recruiters
weren’t bouncing back and forth from one platform to another. Having
everything live within Fountain just made sense.”

The ability to reorganize and customize the hiring funnel has translated into
easy expansion for the company. They’re able to experiment with various
workflow designs and implement unique solutions depending on the requirements of each new geography: “Using Fountain to expand into new markets
definitely makes our jobs easier.”

“Using Fountain to expand into new markets definitely makes our jobs easier”

This flexibility also allowed for optimization of the hiring process: By moving
applicant data collection to the front of the funnel, “we don’t have to worry
about whether a person’s still sitting in a certain stage for days,” said
Hutchins. “And we’re saving the recruiter time.”

Fountain supports the delivery company’s (and all customers’) goals to expand
across borders, get more workers on the ground, and deliver what customers
need when they need it.