The Challenge

SASR Workforce Solutions® — which provides a centralized approach to recruiting and staffing for the retail, grocery, convenience store, logistics, and manufacturing industries — serves clients who need to hire constantly, quickly, and flexibly. In fact, the preferred timeline to initiate an interview for their customers is 8 hours or less after a candidate applies, noted Bradley Cooper, Director of Information Technology at SASR.

In 2020, SASR set a goal to exponentially grow its staffing business from a multimillion dollar company to a $500M+ dollar enterprise. As the team strategized, however, they realized the technology stack in place would fall drastically short in helping them meet those goals. The existing solution — a homegrown proprietary system — presented some key challenges:

• Communication among candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers was a highly manual process, as the system lacked basic ATS and CRM integrations functionality.

• The system couldn’t support a dynamic talent community with strong candidate engagement and reengagement.

Additionally, the existing SASR career site was “superbasic,” according to Cooper. The team realized the site needed modifications to transform it from a job list to a dynamic resource that could be customized to job candidate segments. Completing an opportunity map revealed the following gaps in efficiencies and technology that was holding up faster hiring:

• Applicant tracking

• Holistic tech infrastructure

• Candidate communication

• Employer brand optimization

• Recruitment process automation

• Deployment platforms

The Solution

SASR searched for a solution that could address all of these gaps and move the company closer to meeting expansion goals. Since he “lives and breathes” implementation, Cooper was especially focused on an integrated digital solution that could replace older platforms without disrupting current clients and candidates, and streamline integrations with third-party vendors.

The breadth and depth of solutions offered by the Phenom Intelligent Talent Experience platform — in combination with an entire experience dedicated to supporting HRIS teams — made the decision an easy one.

Here’s how SASR is leveraging the Phenom Intelligent Talent Experience platform to increase efficiency, speed up the hiring process, and provide a cohesive, personalized experience for all their stakeholders:

• Phenom Career Site and CMS gives SASR’s career site the dynamic, refreshed experience it once lacked and points candidates to join a talent community complete with personalized job alerts and more. The team can easily create and plug in content and landing pages specific to clients’ needs.

• Phenom CRM improves the recruiting process exponentially, funneling all talent into a central location to easily nurture active and passive leads, communicate with candidates, send video assessments, schedule interviews, and analyze where leads are in the hiring process and who ultimately get hired.

• Phenom AI Scheduling lifts the manual, time-consuming burden of finding interview times suitable for all parties, driving faster candidate engagement and increased recruiter productivity.

• Phenom Campaigns enables the team to quickly and easily send candidates targeted information relevant to their stage in the talent journey. For example, candidates who haven’t completed onboarding receive invites to virtual onboarding events they can attend for help with the process.

• Phenom Talent Analytics provides guiding insight into source quality, stage and length in the candidate funnel, and career site interactions for efficient optimization.

“Everything now points to Phenom – our referral technology, our social media marketing, our job marketing, and job boards. Now, there’s only one way into our system so we can track performance and optimize,” explained Cooper.

The Results

Phenom has helped SASR’s staffing group position itself to meet the demands of the company’s growth surge through more efficient and scalable processes. A key outcome? SASR can be more intentional in its staffing team structure — streamlining TA roles for a more efficient workflow. By reducing the cost of attracting and retaining right-fit job candidates, they’re able to invest more in their own team. As a result, they’ve been able to increase compensation packages and hire additional recruiters, growing the team from 4 to 14 employees.

With an intuitive user experience on the back end, speed to hire has also improved. “With Phenom, the learning curve is simple. We can expect that in under 30 days, our cohorts are achieving their weekly hiring goals. Before, we expected 180 days before they could be fully productive,” Cooper said.

With their new capabilities, SASR’s average time to hire is performing better than the industry average — plus the team was able to fully hire and onboard 40 people in one day. Their current average remote onboarding completion timeline? Under two weeks.

And with a talent community and campaigns that are run entirely through Phenom, passive leads are being captured and candidate reengagement is soaring between 30% and 40% — turning what was once a largely inactive database of 600K+ into a thriving work-ready talent pool.

Another clear indicator of the results SASR is experiencing since launching Phenom: they increased their full-time equivalent employees by 50%, increased their corporate recruiters 250%, and reduced the attrition of high-turnover employees by 25%.

“Phenom has been the tool that has taken us to the next level in our recruiting efforts by optimizing the candidate’s experience on how quickly we’re able to get them access to employment while also enhancing each recruiter’s daily routine,” added Jason Effinger, Senior Recruiting Manager at SASR.

The Future

Now that growth is underway, there’s no stopping in sight: SASR would like to expand its U.S. corporate workforce by double or even triple digits and scale its field workforce to 100,000+ by 2030, Cooper said.

One way his team plans to help achieve this is by further leveraging Phenom’s predictive modeling capabilities to drive data-driven decision making on as many aspects of TA as possible.

Whether it’s ensuring they’ll have enough employees in the talent ecosystem to cover an upcoming contract, or enough recruiters to dedicate to hiring, “We want to predict when the work is going to be there so we can put it in front of the employees as soon as possible,” Cooper said.