Chick-fil-A Case Study: A Recipe for Hiring Success

Walk into any Chick-fil-A location and you will enjoy not only a delicious chicken sandwich, but an unrivaled customer service experience.  How has Chick-fil-A created such an enduring culture of service? By focusing on their people.

With this philosophy in mind, it’s not surprising that operators across the country utilize an ATS to help them develop a successful hiring process.

CareerPlug’s partnership with Chick-fil-A began with a single operator: Rally DeLeon of Chick-fil-A North Hills. DeLeon’s location received plenty of applications from walk-ins and employee referrals, but he was looking for a way to cast a larger net into the applicant pool and find quality applicants faster. CareerPlug would provide a single system for all applicants – no matter the source – and a consistent process that would lead to better hiring decisions.

Partnership Goal: to make long-term hires by building an employment brand and a consistent process for attracting, screening, and identifying the highest quality applicants.

  • Build an employment brand
  • Quickly identify top applicants
  • Create a consistent process

The Ingredient List for Making Better Hires

Our relationship started with the creation of a consistent employment brand. Without a centralized application and tracking system, creating a uniform experience for multiple sources of applicants is difficult. With CareerPlug, Chick-fil-A North Hills is now able to showcase their career opportunities and highlight core values, benefits, and their location’s culture on a customizable Careers Page. This allows them to automatically make a great first impression for potential applicants. And whether an applicant is coming from the job boards or accessing the link from a sign at the store, they land on the same application.

As stated previously, finding applicants isn’t difficult for Chick-fil-A North Hills. They have a great reputation in the community and a successful employee referral program. CareerPlug gives them a way to efficiently screen the large applicant pool and narrow it down to the quality applicants worth interviewing. They screen applicants by asking questions about previous experience, availability, and personality and then Fast Track these quality applicants to contact them before competitors.

Once applicants are in the interview stage, DeLeon uses the Chick-fil-A core values to develop interview standards and guides to evaluate not only a candidate’s ability to complete the day-to-day tasks of the position but to evaluate their culture fit. He is an avid user of the personality and intellect assessments CareerPlug provides to let you benchmark your top performers and evaluate candidates consistently.

As an operator, DeLeon has an investment in the hiring process. He knows what it takes to be in each position and because of this, has developed an intense recruitment and training program for team members. These are the people who interact with your customers on a daily basis and are the ambassadors of your brand. Making a bad hire can affect your business’ reputation taking the time to build a consistent process for attracting, and screening applicants is worth it.

Since partnering with CareerPlug, DeLeon has interviewed hundreds of applicants and grown his team. With a centralized platform, he is able to scale consistently and continuously make better hires.  

More and more Chick-fil-A operators and managers began to work with us to improve their hiring process. They’ve quickly realized that advertising openings with “Now Hiring” signs and utilizing open interviews as the only step in the hiring process resulted in poor hiring decisions. Building a strong employment brand and instituting an effective hiring practice is a true investment in the long term growth of your restaurant.

To see for yourself how CareerPlug makes hiring easier, get a free demo from a hiring expert today.

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