Zambrero raises its recruitment game with Zapid Hire

Find out how Zapid Hire helped Zambrero get better candidates and schedule interviews twice as fast.

In the quick service restaurant (QSR) industry, securing talent with a promising personality is just as important as finding someone with the right skills and experience. In such an industry where time and efficiency are paramount, recruiting top talent in the quickest and most cost-effective way is crucial.

However, with the traditional hiring process, employers do not gain insight on someone’s personality until the candidate reaches the face-to-face interview phase. By that time, the company would have already spent considerable time and effort sifting through CVs and screening them via phone interviews.

This is what the hiring process is like for most QSRs, including Zambrero. With over 200 restaurants globally, the healthy Mexican food chain struggled with the traditional hiring process.

According to Fiona O’Connor, Group Human Resources Manager at Zambrero, they advertise jobs via posters in restaurant windows as well as employment platforms such as Seek and Indeed. The applicants would then be moved through the process from phone screening to interviewing to trialling and eventually hiring the top talent.

“What we have found using traditional hiring methods is that you are unable to gauge what someone’s personality is like until they are standing in the restaurant for their interview. Quality of candidates has always been a pain point for us, and even more so since COVID-19 has shaken up the hospitality space. We struggle with the amount of time we spend phone-screening candidates and scheduling interviews, only to end up with no-shows because the pool of candidates we have is not very good in the first place,” explains O’Connor.

Enter Zapid Hire, a revolutionary hiring platform that connects Gen Z and young millennials to the best food service, retail and hospitality jobs in Australia. Personality is key for such customer facing roles, and paper CVs just don’t do the job of showcasing that, so Zapid Hire devised a way for candidates to submit mini videos of themselves as part of their application. This allows candidates to be seen for who they truly are, and at the same time, enables QSRs to reduce the overall recruitment time and secure high quality talent.

Zapid Hire requires candidates to put in more effort behind their applications than merely typing up their skills and work experience on a document. As a result, Zambrero found that 9 in 10 candidates that came through Zapid actually showed up for their interview.

“Zapid Hire has been a complete game changer for us. We have been using it as a sourcing and screening tool, channeling all applicants through the platform and removing the CV review and phone screening element of the process. Zapid has also allowed us to showcase our venues using video job ads, which has boosted our employee value proposition and therefore improved the culture fit of the candidates we interview and hire,” says O’Connor. 

Zambrero wanted to dramatically reduce their time to hire without sacrificing the quality of the candidates coming through, and the recent opening of their new restaurant in WA allowed Zapid Hire to prove it can do both.

“Our entire WA team was hired through Zapid Hire. The percentage of candidates who came through Zapid and showed up for their interview was almost double to what we had experienced before using other methods of hiring. We interviewed 30 people for this new opening and hired 25 of them, that’s a pretty incredible conversion rate for our industry. On top of having an amazing opening team, Zapid saved us about 3 days’ worth of interviewing we would have otherwise had to do,” notes O’Connor.

Apart from being able to watch applicants’ videos, Zapid Hire also makes it easier for companies to reach out to their chosen candidates with its messaging function within the app, allowing the team to schedule interviews fast. Employers can go from video to interview in half the time and schedule interviews twice as fast. On the other hand, Zapid Hire also ensures that messaging candidates who did not make it through will be just as easy.

“Whilst it is best practice to inform candidates when they have been unsuccessful, this doesn’t always happen. Zapid has also provided us with the ability to automatically send out personalised unsuccessful text messages when a candidate doesn’t make it through to the next stage. On top of this, everything is text based, so there is no need for you to provide your personal contact details to any candidates in the mix,” adds O’Connor.

Technology has helped transform and streamline various processes in the QSR industry over the years, and recruitment should definitely not be an exception. O’Connor believes that recruitment processes will become faster and easier as the influence of technology begins to take hold. 

“Zapid Hire is going to completely shake-up the way we hire hourly workers across our industry. We also believe Gen Z will continue to demand a mobile-first and technology-driven way to apply for jobs. Zapid, therefore, provides an amazing employee value proposition in this space,” she concludes.

If you are a QSR wanting to automate your recruitment activities and secure the best talent in the process, get in touch with Zapid Hire by clicking here or please email [email protected].