Grocery delivery: Achieved 305% geographic growth in one year

Logistics: The backbone of the global economy

Online shopping (or ecommerce) has skyrocketed in recent years and shows no signs of slowing down. As a result, the demands on the logistics industry are soaring right alongside consumer demands, putting pressure on supply, shipping, and transportation companies to get goods to their customers faster than their competitors.

Logistics teams must lean into the volatility of the industry by keeping their facilities well-staffed and by filling positions quickly as consumer behavior changes. As ecommerce continues its global upward trajectory, companies look to Fountain to find, hire, and retain qualified workers and keep engines running.

Bottlenecks in the hiring funnel

The ebbs and flows of the logistics industry have left recruiters reeling to find and hire workers. In the case of a grocery delivery service that reaches more than 5,000 cities nationwide, the time and effort they dedicated to hiring didn’t always result in successful matriculation.

Before Fountain was implemented at this company, applicants were frequently sitting idle between the data collection stage and the background check, or they were dropping off altogether. With a growing number of applicants each week, performing manual background checks was becoming time- and cost-prohibitive.

Process customization leads to quick cost-cutting

Fountain’s interface and integrations enabled the delivery company to mitigate these problems in two ways. First, the talent acquisition (TA) team took advantage of Fountain’s drag-and-drop workflow editor to rearrange their application stages without the need to involve IT. The qualification stage now appears only after the applicant pool has been refined to a qualified candidate list.

Second, they took advantage of Fountain’s open API to seamlessly integrate with partner Checkr to run background checks after applicants are approved. These changes have led to a 59% reduction in talent acquisition cost.

“Now, until they sign into our app to start working, they don’t undergo a background check,” the operations coordinator said. “That has saved us, just in the last year, about $3.2 million” in talent acquisition costs.

Bulk edits and cloning enable faster growth

Moving background checks to the end of the process wasn’t the only change the company made to optimize their hiring funnel; they also shifted the data collection stage to the front of the pipeline to collect more of the applicant’s information upfront:

“We swapped stages around within the funnels so that we could be more efficient as a team and get applicants through the platform quicker. Now, we do all of our collection upfront so that we can review [the applicants] and approve them as soon as we have a need that week or the next week.”

Within Fountain, talent acquisition teams can make bulk edits to applicant pools and clone stages, which has allowed this grocery delivery company to manage their 350+ unique workflows and to adjust these workflows based on regional requirements as they grow.

“Being able to clone things makes it easier to expand into new markets,” the company’s operations coordinator said.

In 2017, the grocery delivery service was active in 82 markets, which more than tripled in 2018 to 250 markets. Today, workers are active in 299 markets and counting.

As the company grew, in-person interviews became unsustainable. It wasn’t long after the founding of the company that the recruitment team transitioned to virtual interviews. Fountain helped by consolidating video interviews onto one platform and refined the process further by allowing for asynchronous video recordings.

Now, instead of spending time coordinating schedules and meeting for half an hour, applicants simply record themselves stating basic information about their identity in just a few minutes, which not only saves time for both applicants and recruiters but also helps prevent unverifiable applicants from moving forward through the process.

A streamlined and seamless future

When the time came to renew their contract with Fountain, the delivery company chose to continue managing their hiring processes in one place: 

“We wanted everything to be streamlined into one platform so recruiters weren’t bouncing back and forth from one platform to another. Having everything live within Fountain just made sense.”

The ability to reorganize and customize the hiring funnel has translated into easy expansion for the company. They’re able to experiment with various workflow designs and implement unique solutions depending on the requirements of each new geography: “Using Fountain to expand into new markets definitely makes our jobs easier.”

This flexibility also allowed for optimization of the hiring process: By moving applicant data collection to the front of the funnel, “we don’t have to worry about whether a person’s still sitting in a certain stage for days. And we’re saving the recruiter time.”

Fountain supports the delivery company’s (and all customers’) goals to expand across borders, get more workers on the ground, and deliver what customers need when they need it.