Bojangles: Decreased time-to-hire for staff by 80%

‘Before Fountain, our time-to-fill was horrid’

To hire staff for its regional restaurants, Bojangles vetted a number of ATSes before deciding on Fountain, but during their research, they learned these options weren’t built for the mass hiring they needed. A lack of data collection and analysis capabilities, an absence of integrations, and a slow time-to-hire still hindered Bojangles’ ability to hire quickly.

As part of their search for a new hiring solution, Bojangles identified three main issues they wanted to solve:

1. Increase the speed of application flow thereby decreasing time-to-hire
2. Create the best candidate experience possible through ease of use and automation
3. Decrease time-to-fill and get candidates hired fast

“Our time-to-fill was horrid,” said Jacob Salvo, Senior Director of Talent Management at Bojangles, referring to their previous hiring processes, noting that it used to take approximately 30 days to fill open roles. For hourly jobs, this is detrimental to a business’s daily operations.

“It’s always a race against the clock, so being efficient and filling those roles quickly was the biggest goal out of the three goals we had,” Salvo said. “And we found our solution with Fountain.”

‘The results speak for themselves’

When it came time to replace previous hiring systems with Fountain, Bojangles wasn’t concerned about recruiters’ reception to the new technology—they saw it as analogous to upgrading to a new mobile phone: “When you’re going from a crappy cellphone that only makes calls to a smartphone that does a thousand different things, it makes it easier to sell it,” Salvo said.

Bojangles leadership was able to proactively answer current team members’ questions not just by telling them but also by showing them how Fountain would improve their day-to-day duties, especially “once they saw they could take a step back and focus on their jobs. The results speak for themselves, so it was easy to justify.”

With previous hiring systems, prospective candidates had a long and arduous journey from apply to hire, including navigating multiple web pages to find the right role and registering to create an account. But with Fountain, they can skip the registration process altogether and simply text their application information to Bojangles using Text-to-Apply.

Many Bojangles applicants live in rural areas and can’t always get to a restaurant to apply in person. For this reason, a mobile-friendly process is imperative to reach these job seekers. Since incorporating Text-to-Apply into their application process, Bojangles saw a massive improvement in their hire conversion rate, reaching nearly 30%.

Fountain’s automated messaging is another feature that has transformed Bojangles’ communication with candidates. In 2022 alone, Bojangles sent nearly half a million automated messages to candidates to keep them engaged in the process and move them through the funnel faster. But this isn’t just a candidate benefit: The ability to communicate important information to candidates through Fountain’s automated messaging saved Bojangles recruiters approximately 230 hours in 2022.

To hire for all other locations, Fountain’s direct integrations with job boards like Indeed help Bojangles reach even more job seekers with minimal effort and resources. By posting job openings through Fountain, they were able to reduce their monthly job board spend by 86% while improving hiring conversion rates.

With the above features up and running, Bojangles saw their time-to-hire decrease from around 30 days to just 5.8 days.

“Choosing Fountain as our ATS has helped streamline our hiring process, minimized our days-to-hire, and created a hands-off automated application and hiring process, enabling us to find and hire frontline talent efficiently and effectively,” Salvo said.

‘We wanted to keep the human connection’

“Today’s generation is about more technology, less people,” Salvo said, referring to the communication preferences of many Bojangles applicants. “Keeping the human connection was one of my concerns when we knew how much automation there could be.”

Salvo noted it’s easy to lose candidates when the human connection is missing. So they concentrated on keeping that human touch as part of the process, thereby improving the candidate experience.

Fountain enabled Bojangles to maintain this human connection through video. Once a candidate has scheduled an interview, Bojangles automatically plays a video that has been prerecorded by the general manager of that specific location. In the video, the GM welcomes the applicant to the process and expresses their excitement about speaking further about the job opportunity.

By prioritizing the candidate experience and maintaining the human connection, applicants tend to stay engaged in the process and are less likely to drop off or ghost the hiring manager. In the early days with Fountain, Bojangles established a goal application flow rate of 15% to keep candidates moving through the hiring workflow, but in actuality, they ended up reaching 50% with Fountain.

‘My biggest success is silence’

From an operational perspective, Salvo noticed vast improvements across the board, both for recruiters and candidates. With Fountain, they were able to handle the increased volume of applicants coming through the pipeline through automated tasks that used to require recruiter involvement.

Bojangles also spent less time manually entering data, less time on lengthy background checks, and saw improved application completion rates.

Automated knockout questions and programmed background checks, for example, have saved Bojangles invaluable time. In 2022, their routing rules and knockout questions helped automatically disqualify tens of thousands of applicants who weren’t the right fit for the job due to age requirements or other criteria.

Previous systems required recruiters to be hands-on when performing manual background checks, but through Fountain’s integration with Orange Tree, all information is electronically submitted through Fountain, at which point hiring managers can decide on the next steps for each candidate.

These automated systems have had a quieting effect on the hiring funnel, a result that Salvo considers an indicator of success: “My biggest success is silence,” Salvo said. “If you’re doing something wrong, you’re always going to hear about it [from someone in the organization]. But now, it’s quiet because the system is doing what it’s supposed to do.

“With a user-friendly interface and powerful automation features, Fountain has elevated our candidate experience and exceeded our expectations.”

‘I want Fountain on my side’

As far as the future of recruiting is concerned, Salvo feels confident in whatever comes his way. The news of Fountain AI and Fountain’s acquisition of Clevy hit Salvo’s inbox before he even knew Fountain was planning to release an AI feature.

“[Fountain] is coming to me with the tools before I even have to ask for them,” Salvo said. “Who knows what’s coming, but from what I’ve seen, I want Fountain on my side.

Fountain now manages hiring at 750 Bojangles locations.