Background

Alsea, founded in 1997, is a company that operates restaurants of various brands based in Mexico City. It is one of the largest restaurant companies in its sector. Its operating portfolio includes brands such as Starbucks, The Cheesecake Factory and Chili's, and it employs tens of thousands of operational workers in its restaurants.

Challenges

Although many fast food restaurants tend to face a very high turnover rate and a constant need to fill vacancies, this situation worsened due to labor shortages starting in 2020. Alsea has always considered the future of recruitment as a fundamental part of its business growth. However, it needed to hire more than 200 additional employees to meet its hiring needs and achieve its goals in 2022. The options were clear: either Alsea adopted the necessary technology, or it risked being left in an endless cycle of hiring human resources personnel.

“We needed to recruit more than 200 people to manage the volume of hiring we anticipated. So we needed to find a way to combine our current equipment with technology to meet this demand.”

José Albo, Deputy Director of Talent Acquisition & Culture and Internal Communication.

In addition, if Alsea didn't make significant changes, their restaurants wouldn't be fully functional or reflect the strong brand they represented. The company had to decide what the next step would be to secure its future as an operating employer in an increasingly competitive labor market.

Before partnering with Emi, Alsea faced the following challenges:

• It struggled because it didn't have enough critical staff in many of its restaurants, resulting in a significant loss of revenue.
• It was unable to meet its coverage goals, causing a significant loss of income at key facilities.
• He was losing some of his best candidates to his competitors and experiencing a decline in productivity because his hiring period was 42 days.
• It had very high costs for each hire due to the constant increase in the advertising budget, which did not generate an increase in the candidate pipeline.
• I wanted to be recruiting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to better fit the schedules of typical operational workers, but I didn't have reliable tools for that.

Solution

Alsea implemented Emi, the automated operational recruitment platform, to streamline the hiring of more than 26,000 employees for its restaurants. This allowed Alsea to implement its innovative 24/7 text messaging recruitment system, while solving its main challenges stemming from manual and ineffective hiring practices.

With Emi, Alsea was able to differentiate itself from other employers in the market, offering candidates access to new opportunities quickly and easily via SMS or Facebook Messenger. The restaurant company was able to move its recruiters and talent acquisition managers from wasting their time on tedious and low-value tasks to investing it in creating an employing brand and live interviews. Alsea used Emi to manage the previously manual elements associated with the attracting candidates, the selection of applicants, the interview schedule, the Onboarding of new employees And the analysis of your own processes.

These changes in the time spent by HR contributed to the drastic 20% reduction in staff turnover, as recruiters were able to choose candidates from a previously filtered pool and spend more time interviewing applicants, evaluating the most suitable candidate and carrying out a very complete onboarding for new employees.

Results

Alsea experienced several notable changes after implementing Emi, including:

• Optimize the hiring process from start to finish.
• Create a candidate experience that fits applicants' lives.
• Ensure the presence of sufficient staff in their different restaurants.

And this is how these results are reflected in the daily life of Alsea:

Optimize the hiring process from start to finish

With Emi, Alsea was able to shorten all stages of the hiring process, from submitting applications to scheduling interviews. By helping Alsea attract more candidates, filter applications, automatically schedule interviews, collect documentation from hired candidates and onboard new employees, Emi was able to reduce its hiring time from 42 to just 7 days, representing an impressive 83% reduction.

Creating a candidate experience that fits applicants' lives

Alsea's vision of offering candidates the opportunity to submit their application, answer and schedule their interviews at their convenience was achieved thanks to the implementation of Emi. Emi's recruitment through text messages and social media allowed Alsea to reach operational workers wherever they were.

This way, regardless of each person's working hours, everyone can apply for positions at Alsea at any time and schedule their interviews without having to struggle to coordinate with the hiring manager. This approach has been incredibly effective, as noted by Albo:

“60% of our candidates arrive outside working hours or on weekends. They are candidates we couldn't connect with if it weren't for Emi.”

Ensure the presence of sufficient staff in their different restaurants

Before Emi, Alsea struggled to meet its projections because key locations didn't have enough staff for certain specialized roles. Thanks to Emi's automated recruitment platform, Alsea was able to recruit a larger number of candidates and evaluate applicants more quickly and accurately, allowing Alsea to achieve its goal of a coverage rate of 98% on average.