Liveops: Decreased time-to-fill by 48%
About
Liveops is a virtual contact center that delivers scalable, on-demand experiences through their VirtualFlex platform, with an emphasis on customer service and sales support for nationally recognized enterprises. Since 2000, Liveops has been a leader in the virtual and CX space, powering a nationwide network of certified independent agents who create memorable connections with their program’s customers.
Delivering holistic and excellent customer experiences is what drives the team at Liveops, who are grounded in their purpose of improving the lives of their agents, clients, and employees. The agent experience is a crucial piece of the puzzle, as is ensuring their journey is efficient and as seamless as possible from the very beginning.
Cheryl Gunn, Senior Vice President of Operations, has been with Liveops since 2015 and has been pivotal to the success and growth of the company.
Results
48%
20%
100%
Meeting customer demand
Liveops has more than 20 years of experience providing customers with quality agents through high volume recruiting initiatives. As client needs continued to grow, efficiently recruiting agents to meet their needs became a challenge. The company had been using a legacy applicant tracking system (ATS), which resulted in long wait times for applicants, minimal reporting, and limited flexibility to meet their recruiting needs.
“Our previous platform was super inflexible,” said Gunn. “We don’t have a traditional recruiting process, so working within the bounds of a traditional ATS was really difficult for us and there was no wiggle room to do things differently with our existing partner.”
Prior to Fountain, the recruiting department was processing a few hundred thousand applicants per year manually. The team needed a platform that was able to manage their high volumes of applicants so they could scale and continue to meet demand. Liveops had vetted numerous ATS providers, but Fountain’s features and ease of use stood out from the rest. They felt confident that with Fountain, they could deliver better results to their customers with minimal lift from their recruiting team.
“We use Fountain’s SMS feature for everything because the engagement is so high.”
Seamless candidate communication helps expedite fill times
According to CareerBuilder, 81% of candidates indicate that a lack of communication updates during the application process is a major factor that hurts their experience. With the high volume of applicants Liveops is responsible for, losing a candidate due to lack of communication can be detrimental to their business.
Easy communication with candidates via Fountain’s SMS capabilities was a major reason Liveops chose Fountain. Since most people carry their phones with them everywhere they go, the ability for Liveops to connect directly with candidates through text message at any time, from anywhere, was an exciting new concept.
“We have a ton of communication volume—we had around 150,000 messages last year,” said Gunn. “So we use Fountain’s SMS feature for everything because the engagement is so high.
In addition to being able to reach candidates wherever they are, Liveops also has been able to reply to candidates’ queries fast thanks to automated responses, which helps decrease the time it takes to fill roles. Since adopting Fountain, the speed with which Liveops can respond to candidates has helped the recruitment team reduce their time-to-fill by 48%.
“[Fountain’s] automation gives the candidates feedback on where they are in the process,” said Gunn. “As they move through a different stage, they’re getting a text or email from us.”
“What really stands out about Fountain is the automation and the rules.”
Optimizing processes to scale with a small recruiting team
With a recruiting department of only nine team members, Fountain has enabled Liveops to handle more applicants without having to increase staff headcount. Being able to automate tasks has saved the team tens of thousands of hours of manual effort, resulting in a 44,000:1 applicant-to-recruiter ratio in 2022.
“We were growing so fast and adding all these clients and doing all these great things,” said Gunn. “But if our team can’t support them with the necessary number of agents, it doesn’t matter. There’s no growth to be had.”
Liveops has grown significantly since its inception, so leadership needed a solution that would scale alongside the company’s growth but wouldn’t be so labor-intensive that it would cause recruiter burnout. Fountain has enabled the small team to manage around 400,000 applications per year while increasing their fill rate from 90% to 100%.
“We have the ability to customize Fountain to what we need. Not only is it already built to do high volume, but on top of that, we can continue to flex it in the way we need, to do what we need it to do.”
Automating workflows to increase productivity
Fountain’s automation capabilities expand to other areas of Liveops’ recruiting funnel, as well. For example, automatically moving candidates into workflows based on pre-set rules has made a large impact on the Liveops recruiting team. Fountain allows them to create specific rules for each stage of the workflow, which automatically move qualified candidates through the funnel based on their responses, requiring little to no effort from a team member.
“What really stands out about Fountain is the automation and the rules,” said Gunn. “It seems like such a little thing for an ATS to have, but for us, it was game changing. We don’t have to manually figure out if somebody signed their contract; it just moves them forward. If they aren’t qualified, the workflow rejects them. It took such a lift off my team because all of those manual tasks can be built into rules and handled to where we don’t have to be involved.”
Knowing how many candidates are in the funnel and where they are makes it easy for the Liveops team to determine how many roles they need to fill and where they have already met their goals.
“The automation not only gives the candidates feedback on where they are in the process, but it also lets my team have clear visibility into where the applicants are in the process,” said Gunn. “For example, recruiters can see 4,000 people at a background check, 1,000 that are pending results, 500 that have passed, and 20 that have failed.”
Since switching to Fountain in 2021, the Liveops team has seen a 20% increase in filled roles. Without the need for recruiters to manually process applicants, they can now manage higher volumes of candidates.
Building for the future with customization
Fountain helps companies process high volumes of applicants and gives businesses the opportunity to modify the platform to meet their individual needs.
“The ability to customize the email templates and the stages through HTML has been huge,” said Gunn. “That’s been a huge benefit to us as it has enabled us to be as flexible as we need. As long as we can code it, it’ll work in the workflow. It has allowed us to customize the workflow to help candidates understand the journey, such as adding videos and photos.”
Liveops believes that any partnership with a vendor should be a two-way street, and their experience with the Fountain team has exceeded their expectations. Fountain has been an active partner in helping Liveops brainstorm and troubleshoot how to reach their goals while also continuously improving the platform based on feedback to meet growing needs.
“We have the ability to customize Fountain to what we need,” said Gunn. “Not only is it already built to do high volume, but on top of that, we can continue to flex it in the way we need, to do what we need it to do.”