Customer story
Alto: Expands into 5 new markets with Fountain
Fountain streamlines Alto’s hiring process and delivers actionable insights to fuel rapid growth
Alto is a luxury rideshare service that aims to redefine the transportation sector. Unlike their competitors, Alto hires drivers as W-2 employees and provides them with branded vehicles stocked with amenities such as charging cables, WiFi, complimentary water, and umbrellas. Passengers can even opt for a conversation-free ride with the touch of a button.
Founded in Dallas, Texas in 2018, Alto is committed to providing an elevated and consistent experience for all users, distinguishing themselves in the competitive rideshare industry. Alto is led by a dynamic team, including Jimmy Leddy, Program Manager of Supply, who has overseen the company’s hiring process in Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, and Washington, D.C. since 2022.
Manual hiring was stifling growth
When Jimmy Leddy started at Alto, he was excited to see they had been using an applicant tracking system, Fountain Hire, to manage their workforce. In the days before Fountain Hire, Alto’s manually intensive hiring process was a major roadblock for company growth.
“The recruiters would put ads on Indeed and just message the candidates directly,” said Leddy. “Then they would have the applicants come onsite to fill out the application and do an interview.”
With a recruiting team of only one to two people, the old time-consuming process was inhibiting growth. At the time, the Alto team was hiring about 30 employees per week with little to no automation. Approximately one year after their founding, Alto was eager to expand into new markets and started looking for the right hiring solution to accelerate this growth.
“As the business was growing, Alto needed to have a more sophisticated way of tracking applicants, reaching out to applicants, engaging with them, and just having internal metrics for the business,” said Leddy.
Once the team learned about the customization and automation capabilities of Fountain Hire, they were sold.
“Fountain Hire is just a tier above what everyone else is doing,” said Leddy.
“Fountain Hire is just a tier above what everyone else is doing.”
A comprehensive hiring platform built for scale
Fountain Hire’s customizable workflows and AI-powered automation have allowed the team of three recruiters to hire 450 people across five markets in six months.
“Within the application itself, candidates put their availability, they submit a resume, they record themselves answering interview questions, and they fill out a driver quiz,” said Leddy. “That’s all automated through Fountain Hire, so all our recruiters have to do is review everything and see who will move on to the final stage, which is the driving test.”
For a growing business, being able to find and hire drivers quickly is vital, as is the ability to backfill roles. With Fountain Hire, Alto can connect to job boards to seamlessly post roles, which has helped them achieve a time-to-offer of between two to seven days.
“With Fountain Hire, if we want to hire 15 people in a week, we could. If we want to hire 30, we could,” said Leddy. “We’re just hiring based on our numbers, and volume is not a concern at all for us.”
The Alto team has set their sights on other Fountain offerings, as well. For example, Fountain Onboard would allow the Alto team to create a customized, branded, and AI-powered onboarding experience with tailored progress tracking and personalized task dashboards.
“With Fountain Onboard, we are excited for increased engagement, continued training, and better segmentation of our workforce,” said Leddy.
“Fountain will continue to be instrumental in the growth of this company.”
Actionable insights from data and analytics
One of the biggest pain points Alto faced before Fountain Hire was a lack of detailed data and analytics. In order to grow efficiently, the recruiting team needed to be able to see the effectiveness of the hiring process.
“The analytics give us insights into what we need to improve and what we’re struggling with,” said Leddy. “It makes it easy to adapt and make those changes to improve our process.”
Having access to tailored reports and the ability to work through issues with the Fountain Customer Success Manager have allowed Alto to make necessary adjustments while also capturing data on recruiting spend. With Fountain Hire, Alto’s current cost-per-hire is $300, which is significantly less than the average cost-per-hire of $4,700 estimated by the Society for Human Resource Management.
“We can actually collect data on conversion rates and understand how the money we spend correlates to the number of applicants,” said Leddy. “The analytics have leveled up the business overall.”
A better, faster applicant experience with customization
Creating a superior applicant experience is what sets Alto apart from their competitors. The easier and quicker the hiring process, the higher the caliber of candidates the company hires, resulting in exceptional customer service for Alto users.
Prior to using Fountain Hire, applicants had to come onsite multiple times in order to fill out an application form and complete an interview. With the new process enabled by Fountain Hire, only those candidates who pass all the qualifying stages need to show up in person, and Alto’s time-to-contact candidates after review is just 28 hours.
“We’ve already done the whole interview process and everything beforehand,” said Leddy. “Now when they’re coming onsite, they’re coming to do a driving test. And then once they pass the test, they’re offered the job.”
Candidate engagement is a struggle for many companies hiring high volumes of candidates. Fountain Hire’s built-in SMS functionality enables hiring teams to trigger automatic text messages at any point in the hiring funnel.
These messages can inform candidates of the next steps in the process or remind them of interview appointments. Candidates can even respond, which then triggers a notification for recruiters right within the Fountain Hire platform.
“With the automated messages, we are able to keep candidates engaged with Alto the brand,” said Leddy. “The UI for the applicant-facing side is really customizable and looks really nice. And there’s no code on our part to make the UI look good.”
Continued growth with a futureproof workforce management platform
Fountain’s customization and automation capabilities have enabled Alto to rapidly expand during the past several years. With plans to continue to grow into new markets, having a workforce management platform that allows them to streamline their operations throughout the hiring and onboarding journey will be key to keeping their pipeline full and ensuring they are meeting new demand quickly.
“Every product Fountain puts out is something we want to use,” said Leddy. “The Fountain team has been great about involving us in the products they’re looking to develop. It’s something we really value and love to give input on.”
Alto plans to continue to use the Fountain platform (Hire and Onboard) to enhance their hiring and drive business growth.
“Fountain will continue to be instrumental in the growth of this company,” said Leddy.