Fetch: Hiring delivery drivers in less than 8 minutes

Future-proofing high volume hiring

Fetch is a fast-growing startup that is revolutionizing the package delivery industry, one apartment community at a time. But with rapid growth comes a handful of challenges, like having the capacity and volume to scale and build a reliable team to match that growth.

To recruit contracted delivery drivers, Fetch had previously been using an ATS built for full-time, salaried workers—not their target hires. Because this system was designed to support the hiring of highly skilled and experienced workers, the application process demanded too much of applicants. Applicants could not apply from their mobile devices, they were asked to upload a resume even though the role didn’t require one, and the end-to-end application process was overwhelming. This resulted in significant applicant drop-off and an average application processing time of approximately 15 days.

Moreover, because this system was built to manage smaller quantities of applicants, it required the Driver Operations team to manually push applicants through every stage of the process, which was time-consuming and inefficient for an already busy team.

“Applicants need to be able to apply quickly,” said Prijic. And on the recruiter side, “they have to be able to handle the volume that’s going to come with thousands of applicants weekly, without having to manually move applicants through the pipeline.”

This overcomplicated system not only created a barrier to Fetch’s recruiting efficiency but also threatened their ability to meet their increasing customer demand.

“We had hit a fork in the road where we needed to scale the hiring and onboarding of drivers without expanding our Driver Operations team,” Prijic said. They needed a solution that would address their current hiring challenges and set them up for success as they expanded geographically.

Customization through automation

The first step toward attracting the right applicants was to build a workflow that was tailored to both the applicant’s and the recruiter’s specific needs. For the applicant, this meant a fast, seamless, mobile-friendly, and resume-free application process, and for the Driver Operations team, this meant an automated, easy-to-manage high volume pipeline.

Fetch partnered with Fountain and started building automated workflows to address these specific needs through customization.

“Fountain was the only option we found that met the needs we had,” said Prijic. “It was the high volume recruitment platform with all the future-proofing potential we needed.”

For the applicant experience, the Driver Operations team prioritized ease of use and speed. Previously, candidates were dropping off before completing the application, which negatively impacted Fetch’s volume of hires and applicants. Prijic and Rogers wanted to ensure that applicants could apply in one sitting and directly from their mobile devices. They were able to leverage Fountain’s automation to move applicants through each stage quickly, which also reduced the manual involvement required of the Driver Operations team.

“We experienced a huge upgrade from the amount of automation built into Fountain,” Rogers said. “We don’t need to manually push applicants through the pipeline anymore—they just go through the process automatically. This allows us to focus more on candidate engagement and the onboarding process.”

Fetch saw additional improvements in their success metrics after implementing Fountain AI into their workflow. After just one month, Fetch more than doubled their hire rate and decreased their time-to-hire by 95% by reducing their hiring time from 15 days to only 6.5 hours.

Increasing efficiency with direct integrations

Increasing the efficiency of the Driver Operations team also meant decreasing the total number of tools needed to manage their wider hiring and onboarding processes. Previously, they relied on a broad tech stack, which included an HRIS, ATS, payroll system, and background check provider, all in addition to Fetch’s own driver software. With Fountain, the Driver Operations team was able to more easily manage the funnel by directly integrating Fountain with their other tools, creating a veritable hiring command center.

“The integrations with other applications made the biggest difference,” said Rogers. Fountain’s broad range of integrations revealed to Fetch how they could optimize their hiring process in ways they had never considered before.

“Now, applicant information goes from Fountain straight to our back end, and then back into Fountain,” said Prijic. “There is a back-and-forth communication there, and to the candidate, this is seamless.”

With Fountain’s automated Yardstik background check integration in place, applicants can be cleared in as little as one day: “If the background check was instant, you would be able to start working 30 seconds after applying,” Prijic said.

By building a more streamlined workflow thanks to Fountain’s integrations, Fetch was able to automate once-manual stages of the hiring funnel, which resulted in a notably faster process for both the applicant and the recruiter.

“We’re a logistics business—we’re very mobile-first and speed-oriented,” Prijic said. “The faster we can get applicants through the funnel, the faster we can get them started, and the more likely they are to stick around long term.”

Upleveled recruitment through the power of AI

With the newfound capacity to manage applicants at volume, Fetch continued to expand. New warehouses opened up across the country, leading to heightened demand for readily available drivers. To meet this demand, the Driver Operations team needed to widen the top of the hiring funnel and increase the total pool of drivers, fast. With Fountain on their side, Fetch was able to promote open postings across multiple job boards.

“Fountain has centralized knowledge of how to recruit workers,” Prijic said. “We’ve been able to cast a wider net and then use [Fountain] software to filter for the types of people we want to engage with.”

More specifically, Fountain’s AI solutions enabled Fetch to increase the volume and quality of their applicant pool, while simultaneously opening up time and resources for the Driver Operations team to dedicate to the human side of their hiring process. With Fountain AI, candidates can get timely answers to FAQs, upload documents, and make their own way through the workflow, all without needing a recruiter.

Fountain AI coupled with the workflow rules the team had in place allowed quality candidates to move through the workflow in as little as 8 minutes. After implementing Fountain AI, Fetch also saw a dramatic increase in candidate engagement—going from an average of 0.5 messages to 5.5 messages during the application process—resulting in applicants getting through the pipeline even faster than with the standard Fountain application.

With Fountain doing the heavy lifting sourcing applicants and streamlining the application process, Prijic and Rogers have channeled their energy into enhancing the candidate experience.

“We now can control the onboarding process and ensure new hires feel like they are getting the attention they need, one-on-one,” Prijic said. “Fountain has allowed us to focus more on how we are retaining drivers and how we are onboarding them in-person on day one.”

A scalable solution with data at its core

Fountain has optimized Fetch’s hiring process not only by increasing the speed and volume at which applicants are sourced and pushed through the funnel, but also by building a reliable and scalable hiring machine that can grow and evolve with Fetch as the business expands to new markets.

“Launching a new location is not a concern from a recruitment side anymore,” Prijic said. “Fountain removes the whole process of figuring out how to get drivers quickly. It’s helping us scale with that growth.”

Within one year of launching Fountain, Fetch increased their monthly driver applicant volume by 325% and they continue to manage more than 10,000 monthly applicants with their small-but-mighty three-person Driver Operations team.

In addition to using Fountain to manage and scale their sourcing, screening, and hiring processes, Fetch also uses the platform to benchmark progress and optimize their hiring strategy as they grow. With Fountain’s robust collection of data reporting, the Driver Operations team has gained visibility into hiring insights that help inform best practices unique to their openings and applicant pool, empowering them to proactively adjust as they go.

Before using Fountain, Fetch’s hiring system had inefficiencies that went unnoticed because they didn’t have the information necessary to identify and address them. With Fountain’s data insights, Fetch now has unlimited potential and the organization has been able to reach new heights in hiring efficiency.

“With Fountain, it felt like we went from a horse and buggy to a Formula 1 racecar in a month’s time,” Prijic said. “Before, we didn’t have the infrastructure to capture the right data. Now, we’re collecting all the data we need in order to make minor switches that speed up the process.”

Going forward, Fetch plans to continually optimize hiring with Fountain as a trusted partner as they scale to new markets across the country.

“To us, Fountain is more than an applicant tracking system,” Prijic said. “It’s the one centralized source of truth for our entire hiring process.”