Customer Success Story

Safeway Uses Fountain to Rapidly Expand its Grocery Delivery Business Across the U.S.

Fountain's software helps Safeway’s e-commerce division quickly and cost-effectively hire a large hourly workforce of delivery drivers to meet rising customer expectations for convenience.

Safeway’s E-commerce

2nd
largest grocery chain
More than
2,200

Each year, more customers are demanding the ability to order groceries online and have them delivered immediately to their doorsteps. And competitors like Whole Foods (which was recently purchased by e-commerce giant Amazon), Costco, and Instacart are making that pressure even stiffer with their quick progress on grocery delivery.

200,000 people

The Challenge

1. Need to hire about 20 drivers per week

2. Need to expand service to 10 new states in 2 years

Safeway doesn’t want to fall behind, and one of the chain’s priorities is expanding its nascent grocery delivery business to better compete.

Safeway offered grocery delivery in only 8 states in 2015, and by the end of 2018 they want to be in 18 states. But to achieve this ambitious goal, the grocery chain needs to hire a lot of hourly workers as soon as they possibly can. Fountain’s software is helping Safeway meet this challenge by empowering them to hire hourly workers faster and less expensively.

Staffing all of the delivery hours that customers want is one of the biggest impediments to growing the e-commerce business. In order to keep that pace, Human Resource Manager Regina Parker and her team need to hire about 20 drivers per week!

Stiff competition for hourly workers!

Safeway isn’t the only company which needs massive amounts of on-demand, hourly workers to make their business work. They compete for workers with both traditional retailers and also quickly-expanding on-demand companies like Uber, Lyft, Doordash, and a host of others. If their hiring process doesn’t move as fast as possible, then they risk losing a large portion of their talent pool to other opportunities.

How Fountain helped them solve the problem

1. Shorter interest forms

2. Same-day responses to applicants

3. No missing data

Before Regina started, Safeway e-commerce was using a shared email inbox to field inquiries. This made it confusing to applicants who wanted to get in touch, and resulted in applications missing key information like phone numbers.

With Fountain, they have replaced this process with a quick, 4-question interest form that is mobile-responsive and sends the responses directly into the Fountain applicant tracking system that lets Safeway recruiters communicate quickly with applicants via email, text, and phone. All-in-all, this means that applicants can apply quickly and every applicant gets an initial call from a recruiter same day or next day.

Results

Efficient and cost effective Growth

"We are having applicants complete interest forms sometimes within 30 to 45 minutes of the posting going up on Craigslist. And because my team can respond faster, we can post a job today and have a few candidates in front of a hiring manager to interview tomorrow."

— Regina Parker, HR Manager, Albertsons E-Commerce Unit (Safeway’s parent company)

Hiring a single worker costs Safeway $8,000 to $9,000 on average. Most of this cost is staff time for recruiters, hiring managers, and trainers who have to schedule calls and meetings, review documents, and conduct background checks. Fountain saves Regina’s lean talent acquisition team 10 hours a week in administrative work.

With a team of only 3 talent acquisition representatives and 4 other back office helpers, Regina has been able to grow her workforce efficiently and cost-effectively with the help of Fountain.