Background

Del Monte Foods, for more than 135 years, has been one of the world's leading suppliers of packaged consumer goods (BCE or CPG), specializing in fruits, vegetables and soups. It is known as the “original plant-based food company”, with a portfolio of well-known brands including Del Monte®, Contadina®, College Inn®, Kitchen Basics®, JOYBA®, Take Root Organics™ and S&W®. Del Monte Foods employs thousands of operational workers during the summer packaging season in the United States and Mexico.

Challenges

Del Monte Foods had unique needs that led them to turn to Emi. As an employer of primarily seasonal operating workers, their talent attraction team needed to find a way to scale their operations quickly. Unfortunately, manual and inconsistent hiring processes meant that recruiters spent much of their time on purely operational tasks.

The Del Monte Foods season begins when the product is ready to be harvested, but it varies slightly from year to year. Therefore, when a person is hired for a position, the start date is not fixed and is likely to start 4 to 8 weeks after official hiring. This is a sensitive time in the hiring process and as a result, up to 50% of new employees were lost due to competition and ghosting.

This often left the team understaffed at the peak of its season, inevitably forcing the talent attraction team to offer overtime to existing employees or to hire vendors who paid considerably more than their average employee. Understaffed locations had unforeseen problems and costs that reduced their profits.

As if all this wasn't enough, the Del Monte Foods team hires candidates who speak primarily Spanish and didn't always have the staff available to meet all their requirements. In fact, more than 70% of candidates speak mainly Spanish. The team needed to find a way to communicate equally effectively in English and Spanish, even if HR managers and recruiters didn't speak both languages.

Therefore, Del Monte Foods worked with Emi to overcome the following challenges:

• Managing candidate turnover
• Standardize the hiring process across all locations
• Communication in multiple languages.
• Minimize wasted time due to manual processes
• Improve interview attendance rates and the first day of work
• Implement data tracking to avoid labor shortages

“The large amount of time that recruiters needed to maintain continuous communication with candidates, follow up, select, schedule and conduct interviews was a big problem for our team. These operational tasks were taking too long.” - Laura Birsinger, Sr. Manager, Data Analysis - Human Resources, Del Monte Foods, Inc.

Del Monte Foods had multiple problems to solve, and innovative people like Laura realized that automating recruitment could help overcome many of their challenges.

Solution

Del Monte Foods adopted Emi, the automated operational recruitment platform, to address these challenges.

The recruitment team used Emi's multilingual artificial intelligence chatbot to interact with candidates in both English and Spanish, while recording all candidate data in English. This reduces time spent on translation and improves data quality. In addition, it results in a greater number of completed requests. SMS communication makes it easy to notify interview candidates and keep in touch until their start date. And the team can take advantage of Emi's analytics dashboard to view important reports, such as the number of employees they need to hire before their peak season.

With Emi's function to keep in touch with candidates, the recruitment team can send several SMS, WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger text messages before their start date to validate if they are still interested in joining the company or, if not, ask why. This allows the team to know as soon as possible how many positions they need to hire before the season. In addition, this functionality allows the talent attraction team to collect data on the reasons why new employees end up leaving work. Previously, this information was based only on a hypothesis, but it was not formally measured. By taking advantage of this Emi functionality, the talent team saw a 42% reduction in candidates lost between the hire date and the start date.

By streamlining the recruitment process, the team reduced the time spent on each candidate interviewed by 30 minutes. And since the different teams used Emi, the hiring processes of the different headquarters were the same. This improved the candidate experience and had a positive impact on the efficiency of employees and the company in general.

Results

After adopting Emi, Del Monte Foods achieved several positive results, including:

Confirmation of the intention of the contractors to join the company

The Del Monte Foods process does not end the start date when hiring. Because of this, the organization lost up to 50% of the candidates they hired while waiting for the season to start. Thanks to continuous communication through Emi, the team has achieved a 75% response rate in “check-in” messages to candidates, and a 95% interest in keeping the job, which resulted in a 42% decrease in candidates lost between the hiring date and the start date.

Reducing the time recruiters spend on manual tasks

Del Monte Foods' recruitment and hiring teams used Emi to reduce redundancies in their processes. In the first few months after implementation, Emi conducted more than 7,000 interviews with potential candidates. If each conversation with a recruiter had lasted just two minutes, their team would have spent 14,000 minutes of working time. In addition, the recruitment team discovered that with Emi, just pressing three buttons is enough to have 100 candidates ready to go for an interview. And candidates who had previously contacted Emi had better knowledge of the position and hiring requirements.

Speak to candidates in their preferred language

Before Emi, it was difficult to provide candidates with a consistent experience in both English and Spanish. Recruiters were forced to use translations or rely on other team members who spoke Spanish. With Emi, interested candidates can apply and simply select the language in which they want to interact with Emi's artificial intelligence chatbot. This results in a better experience for candidates and increases the number of interviews completed, which in turn increases the number of applications.

Increase in the number of completed requests

Before adopting automated recruitment, Del Monte Foods struggled with losing candidates during the application process. In the words of Birsinger: “One of the biggest challenges was getting candidates to complete the online application. They started it and never finished it.” Now, with Emi, candidates can easily apply, using a chat that is familiar to them, and in their native language.