How LSG Sky Chefs Transformed Manual Hiring into a Scalable Growth Engine with Fountain

LSG Sky Chefs is a global airline catering and hospitality provider operating 30+ kitchen locations with high-volume, distributed hiring needs. To support rapid workforce demands while standardizing processes across decentralized sites, LSG Sky Chefs needed a faster, more data-driven approach to recruiting.

Fountain’s real-time analytics and scalable workflows helped Sky Chefs improve their quality of hire, reduce attrition, and transform hiring from a manual process into a proactive, high-performance engine.

The Challenge: Siloed Operations and Manual Processes

With more than 30 locations operating independently, LSG Sky Chefs faced a fragmented and inefficient hiring process.

“Everything was just causing our candidates to potentially have to come back into the building three to four times,” Chelsea explains. “That is not sustainable when you’re trying to hire someone quickly.”

Each location operated in silos, with little visibility into what was working and what wasn’t. The team struggled to answer critical questions:

• Where were candidates coming from?

• Why were some locations performing better than others?

• How could they consistently improve results?

At the same time, their hiring process was highly manual. Candidates filled out paper applications in person, interviews were scheduled separately, and HR teams had to log into multiple systems to complete each hire. A single hire could take 4 to 5 hours of administrative effort.

The lack of data, automation, and consistency made it difficult to scale — especially in a high-volume, fast-paced environment.

The Turning Point: Data-Driven Visibility and Standardization

For LSG Sky Chefs’ executive leadership team, analytics were a deciding factor.

“The robust analytics that we have within Fountain was the number one selling point,” Chelsea says. “They want to see results.”

With Fountain, LSG Sky Chefs gained real-time insight into their recruiting funnel across every location. While operational needs differed — from Pittsburgh to LAX — they could now see:

• What was working

• What needed to be tweaked

• Where candidates were dropping off

• Which sources were driving quality hires

This level of visibility allowed them to shift from reactive hiring to proactive workforce planning.

“Now we get to be proactive instead of reactive.”

From Manual to Modern: Cutting Hiring Time from Hours to Minutes

Before Fountain, hiring required multiple systems and manual coordination. After implementation, everything changed.

“None of my business partners or HR business partners are having to log into multiple systems,” Chelsea explains. “It has created what maybe has been a four or five hour process to 30 minutes.”

By centralizing workflows into one platform and automating key steps, Fountain helped LSG Sky Chefs:

• Eliminate paper applications

• Streamline interview scheduling

• Reduce administrative burden

• Shorten time-to-hire

The result wasn’t just speed — it was quality.

“Even though our process has now been expedited, we’re actually getting more quality because we’ve been able to build out customizations that fit our organization.”

Fast Implementation, Immediate Impact

Large-scale integrations often take months. For LSG Sky Chefs, Fountain completed HRIS and background check integrations in just 60 days — a timeline Chelsea describes as “unheard of.”

And the impact was immediate.

“We used those integrations to hire and onboard 800 people in two weeks.”

This level of speed and scale was critical for an organization operating high-volume kitchens and hubs that support airline partners around the world.

Scalable Hiring — From Rural Kitchens to Major Hubs

One of the biggest advantages of Fountain for LSG Sky Chefs is scalability.

“Whether we’re hiring 50 people or 1,000 or 1,500 people, the process is still congruent,” Chelsea says.

From rural kitchens in remote areas to major hubs housing over 1,100 employees, Fountain enables consistent, standardized hiring across all locations — without sacrificing local flexibility.

The result:

• Improved candidate experience

• Improved HR business partner experience

• Reduced attrition through better quality hires

“There is less attrition that’s taking place amongst our locations, and a part of that is because now we’re getting a quality hire.”

A True Partnership

For Chelsea and her team, the technology was only part of the story.

“I love that Fountain comes in with a full team, and they are really, truly available to assist your business and how you’re structured,” she says. “They know the technical aspects of it, but they also understand the business aspects of it.”

The implementation felt collaborative, not transactional.

“It felt like we were all on the same team.”

The Results: Becoming an Employer of Choice

Since implementing Fountain, LSG Sky Chefs has transformed its hiring operations — modernizing processes, gaining visibility, reducing attrition, and dramatically increasing efficiency.

“It has transformed our candidate experience, our HR business partner experience,” Chelsea shares. “It was like winning the lottery.”

Today, LSG Sky Chefs is more innovative, more data-driven, and better positioned to compete for talent.

“We definitely just have become a lot more innovative, and that has put us in the forefront of truly becoming the employer of choice that we want to be.”