How Zapid Hire revolutionised the recruitment process in the QSR industry

When you’re a successful restaurant with 200 branches globally, chances are, you’re frequently on a hiring spree and you spend a lot of time acquiring the best talent. Such was the case for Mexican food chain Zambrero. Its founder Sam Prince, along with his apprentice Andrew Dewez, thought the recruitment process had become costly, inefficient, and time-consuming.

This was when the idea for building Zapid Hire was born - a platform that aims to deliver a better hiring experience, and one that the Gen Z could latch onto and access easily, as if they were only browsing social media.

“The key insight we had was, if you're going to hire a designer you would look at their website portfolio, if you were going to hire a developer, you would look at the code they write, but if you're going to hire someone in a customer facing role, you need to look at their personality. Written resumes and cover letters do a really bad job at this,” Dewez, co-founder and CEO of Zapid Hire, said.

Hiring pain points
When COVID-19 hit the retail and hospitality industries, restaurants experienced the greatest re-hiring period they have ever seen. Businesses had to adopt remote and automated hiring to help speed up their process and ensure they are getting enough candidates applying for their roles. This spurred the launch of Zapid Hire, one of the first platforms to offer automated recruitment, cutting the hiring process short and making it more enjoyable.

By leveraging cutting-edge technologies, Zapid Hire addresses three hiring pain points that QSRs experience: piles of resumes, no shows, and legacy platforms.

Usually, hiring managers flip through as many as 100 resumes each day, shortlisting qualified candidates, and calling them one by one. Zapid Hire replaced this part of the process with a step that requests short, Instagram-style videos from candidates featuring their personality and soft skills. Employers can customise their needs and find the best fit from Zapid Hire, who with industry partnerships have access to over 1,000,000 candidates nationwide.

QSRs also have to deal with no shows, or candidates who go through the recruitment process, agree to interview, and suddenly go missing. Hiring managers point to the slow hiring process: email correspondence results in less than 20% open rate, takes up a lot of time, and oftentimes leads to candidates finding another job elsewhere.

Zapid Hire solves this by using chat and scheduling text reminders to ensure that candidates show up for the interviews. As a result, Zapid Hire has less than 1% no show rate, its average time to hire is only six days (industry average is 28 days), and the applicant to interview ratio is 40% (industry average is 17.9%)

The last pain point is legacy platforms. Many companies are used to working with applicant tracking systems and hiring job boards, but steep learning curves are a deterrent to fast hiring for many franchisees. Zapid Hire created a highly intuitive mobile app where employers can easily review candidates and schedule interviews when they have a spare second.

The fight for talent
QSRs must have a fast and automated hiring process if they do not want to miss the highest quality applicants in the job market. Not only that, they must also remember that they will increasingly hire more individuals from Gen Z in the coming years. “QSRs must also focus on their employee value proposition. Candidates, especially Gen Z will refuse to apply to roles with an outdated hiring practice, especially if it's not mobile-friendly,” Dewez adds.

Zapid Hire is not only mobile-friendly, it is mobile-first. The app also uses video job ads to help showcase a brand's culture and personality, often resulting in a conversion rate five times higher than traditional recruitment ads. “Video is the future of hiring. It shows you soft skills and personality, and allows venues to cut out the phone screening and interview, and place candidates straight in for a trial,” notes Dewez.

QSRs that continue to put recruitment automation on the back-burner will find themselves lagging behind their competitors. Not only do platforms like Zapid Hire benefit recruiters, candidates will also find themselves enjoying the process and building a better relationship with their prospective employers.

High-volume recruitment is a tedious process and one that requires lots of work to find the best talent available. Whilst automation is not meant to replace recruitment experts, it does provide a faster, more efficient way to get to know employees, especially for QSRs that rely heavily on soft- and personality-based skills that are key to customer-facing roles.