Eden Brothers, a company that sells plant seeds, ramps up its hiring every year to staff up for the Spring season. The surge in staff is mostly seasonal support with a few that transition to permanent positions. It’s frantic, it’s all-consuming, it’s painful… until this year.
This year, Eden Brother’s HR partner CraftHR took a new approach.
CraftHR redesigned their talent acquisition process, adding definition, streamlining procedures, and introducing Career.Place. The change was extraordinary.
Eden saw a 60% reduction in effort, with the average time spent filling jobs dropping from 25 hours to 8.5 hours. And that was just the beginning.
The Before:
Desi, the CraftHR specialist leading the effort with Eden Brothers, inherited a familiar process full of manual steps and subjective judgement calls.
“The process was time consuming … very, very time consuming.”
It started by manually putting the job descriptions on several job boards. Then, every day, Desi reviewed the applications that had accumulated in the ATS or within the job boards (depending on the job board). She spent 2 – 5 minutes per candidate reviewing resumes and choosing those that most likely met the requirements.
For those she selected, Desi scheduled a screening call through multiple back and forth messages adding another 10 minutes per candidate. If the candidate showed up, she would spend 20 to 30 minutes asking a series of questions, type up her notes, and send them to the hiring manager.
The hiring manager would then say yes or no, and the scheduling process would start over adding another 10 minutes per candidate. For the candidates that showed up, the hiring manager and one other interviewed them and gave them a tour, spending 30 – 60 minutes with each.
If the Hiring Manager chose to hire, Desi spent another 30 minutes for the offer, response, and any questions. If they accepted, and if they showed up, the job was done.
All in all, it took an average of about 25 hours per job.
Add to it the volumes of no show, no accept, and attrition, and the process was never-ending.
“The entire season we were in a constant state of urgent need to hire From January through April, we worked overtime just to keep up. It cost us and Eden a huge amount of time and resources and we never caught up.”
The Now:
To solve the huge time and resource demands, high attrition rates, and never-ending urgent scramble, CraftHR introduced a new approach to the hiring process with the Career.Place candidate screening platform at its center.
The new process started with the job. CraftHR worked with hiring managers to define the true needs of the job. They walked through the true requirements and crafted questions for candidates and how to evaluate the responses. These conversations took about 20 to 30 minutes per job.
“One of the early benefits of Career.Place is it forces us and the hiring team to think smartly about the job. We are no longer able to post and ‘see what happens’. We now have to think through what we need in successful employees and how to screen for it. It takes a bit more up-front time but has a huge return on the investment.”
With the requirements and evaluation questions administered through Career.Place, rather than sifting through hundreds of resumes, Desi spent 5 – 10 minutes every morning reviewing the responses from candidates that met minimum qualifications. For those with strong answers she would contact and schedule the hiring manager interview. No screening calls!
“I LOVED THAT! We had better quality candidates without wasting a second of time coordinating and conducting phone screens.”
In all, the hours spent hiring reduced over 60%, dropping from 25 hours per job to 8.5 hours.
And the savings didn’t stop there. The new process had several additional benefits.
More candidates showed up: Candidates selected for the interview showed up for the interview. Over 90% showed up, as compared to less than 75% in previous years.
Higher quality hires: The new hires performed better. Hiring managers praised the quality of hire and quality of work as compared to previous years.
Thanks to the new approach, Desi went from spending months working overtime just to keep up with the unending seasonal demand, to just a few weeks without overtime to fill the required headcount. Less time, less money, higher quality hires.
“Career.Place is such a beautiful experience, especially as compared previous years. I never want to go back because it was miserable.”