125,000
7 minutes
30%
UPS is one of the world’s largest package delivery and supply chain management companies, hiring hundreds of thousands of frontline workers every year. To keep pace with demand, especially during peak seasons, UPS needed a hiring engine built for speed, scale, and compliance. With Fountain, they found all three.
The Challenge: Manual Processes at an Unmerciful Scale
When you’re hiring tens of thousands of people in a single week, every second counts. But before Fountain, UPS’s hiring process was anything but fast.
“Pre-Fountain at UPS, the hiring experience looked much different,” says Emma Gregory, Global Talent Acquisition Director at UPS. “We had a homegrown system where there were a lot of manual processes, touch points, almost a heaviness to the workflow processes.”
That “heaviness” wasn’t just a nuisance, it was a bottleneck with compounding consequences. A slow, manual process stretched time to hire across several weeks, creating friction for candidates and strain for recruiting teams. At UPS’s scale, inefficiency doesn’t stay small for long.
The Solution: Speed, Automation, and a Smarter Candidate Experience
UPS partnered with Fountain to reimagine hiring from the ground up, and the impact was immediate. The headline result? Time to hire dropped from several weeks to just seven minutes.
“Reducing time to hire from what was previously several weeks down to a job offer in seven minutes was unheard of,” Gregory says. “And then multiply that by the scalability of how many people and teammates that we hire every single year: it is massive.”
But speed was only part of the story. Fountain’s customizable workflows also transformed how UPS keeps candidates engaged throughout the process.
“Even small tweaks, like adding in customizable alerts and messaging to keep candidates warm – multiply that across several hundred thousand hires, and you’re instantly elevating that candidate experience side,” Gregory explains. “They want the instant job offer, and we can now provide that, which is super cool.”
Compliance at Scale: Zero Room for Error
For UPS, hiring isn’t just a volume game, it’s a compliance imperative. As an organization that works closely with government agencies, every single hire must be airtight.
“As a large organization that partners with government agencies, we don’t have an option but to be 100% compliant on absolutely everything,” Gregory says.
Before Fountain, manual processes left room for missed steps and human error. Automation changed that.
“When you reduce manual efforts, you also reduce manual errors. There’s no missed areas or skipped areas.” With Fountain handling the workflow, UPS can move fast without cutting corners, a combination that simply wasn’t possible before.
A Partnership, Not Just a Platform
What sets UPS’s story apart isn’t just the metrics, it’s the relationship. Emma Gregory is deliberate about the language she uses: Fountain is a partner, not a vendor.
“From the beginning of our partnership with Fountain, and I do say partnership, it has been amazing,” she says. “We have an enhancement list that we work through and collaborate across all of our internal stakeholders to really partner and see how we can make this the best system and technology for UPS.”
That spirit of co-innovation shows up every day. UPS regularly pilots new features with Fountain, even at what Gregory calls a “smaller scale,” which for UPS means 10,000 hires, to validate new process flows before rolling them out more broadly.
“Coming collaboratively with new ideas, innovating together: that’s something that we see in the partnership with Fountain every single day.”
And at the core of it all is something harder to measure but equally important: trust. “I feel like Fountain truly listens to us, understands our business, dives in. They’re truly an extension of our team, and that has been amazing.”
The Results: Hiring at the Speed of UPS
Since implementing Fountain, UPS has fundamentally transformed how it acquires frontline talent: faster, smarter, and at a scale that once seemed impossible.
“Even the smallest process improvement, multiplied by 40,000 hires in a week, makes a huge difference,” Gregory says. “Fountain has played a critical role in the success of that and being able to scale our hiring needs.”