When it comes to answering the question, “Why SMS?” or “Why Grayscale?” we like to focus on the ways that texting can impact the overarching success of your hiring process. This success could look like: better response rates, a faster response time, a decrease in your time-to-fill, and an increase in your overall candidate experience or candidate engagement.

In addition to these benefits, we also like to highlight the impact that a highly integrated tech tool can have on your recruiting team.

The work of high-volume recruiters can be downright disheartening. Turns out, HR experiences some of the highest turnover rates at around 14%. It doesn’t stop there though; with recruiting specifically being known for its high turnover rates, many recruiters, especially those in high-volume roles, experience burnout at an alarming pace.

When Ty and Hubert set out to create a texting solution that worked, not only did they want it to provide a way for TA teams to better serve their candidates, but they also wanted to create something to serve the specific needs of high-volume recruiters.

Over the past few years, Grayscale has worked with some phenomenal TA teams and recruiters to revolutionize their workflows and supercharge their hiring processes. One of those teams just so happened to include Sara Perkins, one of our Enterprise Customer Success Managers here at Grayscale.

Sara’s background includes a stint in high-volume recruiting at Wayfair, which involved the selection, integration, and adoption of Grayscale for the recruiting teams and more.

We sat down to chat about Sara’s experiences in a high-volume role and the positive impacts that came along with building out the right tech stack for her and her team.

To begin, we explored what a day in the life of a high-volume recruiter looks and feels like.

 

How do you manage a workload that large?

“Some days, it sure doesn’t seem like it’s humanly possible. Especially the days where you get on a meeting with your manager to find out that your team is tasked with 300+ new openings to fill—within a matter of… weeks… maybe even days…”

 

When it comes to the way it impacts your life outside of work, she said,

“It’s true, high-volume can take a huge toll on your work-life balance—but only if you let it.”

 

For Sara, she had to learn how to embrace the tools and technologies at her disposal to set boundaries and protect her mental health outside of work.

Most high-volume recruiters are working with similar tech stacks, but Sara recommends:

• An ATS (She was on Greenhouse at the time.)
• Your Email
• Google Sheets
• Grayscale

When it came to embracing the workload and finding tech that helped make life easier, Sara was thrilled to be involved in the selection of Grayscale.

 

When you helped introduce Grayscale to the team, how did it go?

In previous roles, Sara noted that she had used texting platforms (though not Grayscale) and was passionate about finding a tool that would easily incorporate into her workflow.

“I’d seen great success with meeting my goals in previous roles by [using SMS], so when Wayfair was introducing Grayscale to the high-volume recruiting teams, I was able to position myself to take a lead role in the rollout of the tool to my peers.”

 

With Sara’s past experience with a texting tool, she was really excited about finding something like that for the rest of the team at Wayfair.

 

What were you most excited about when you found Grayscale?

During the RFP process, Sara demoed a few different tools and was blown away by Grayscale’s deep integration with Greenhouse.

There were a few options that would enable 1-1 messaging with candidates, but having a tool that would leverage automations to send messages on Sara’s behalf as she moved candidates through stages in Greenhouse was a gamechanger.

For Sara, this made it drastically easier to maintain her workflow in her ATS without having to carve out time to send all those comms in other channels.

Not only was Sara impressed by the features and rich capabilities of Grayscale, but she loved that Wayfair had a partner in the Grayscale team. With a listening ear, Sara knew she would be able to easily give feedback in regards to the platform and functionality and have that feedback be heard and taken into consideration for future development.

“Finding Grayscale was like finding the needle in the haystack. It was a great product with a really great team.”

 

What kind of impact did a texting tool have on your work/life balance?

Sara and the Wayfair team rolled Grayscale out during the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. The TA team was working from home, while trying to meet aggressive hiring goals for warehouse, customer service and sales, and many other high- volume roles.

“This was the first time we as a team were fully working remotely. Like everyone else experienced, there was a big learning curve to managing our work-life balance.”

 

With the help of Grayscale’s deep integration, the TA team at Wayfair was able to create a better workflow for their recruiters using the handy Chrome extension, Automations, and Nudges.

Sara was so excited because not only did this workflow save her a lot of time and clicks, but it also drastically changed what she was capable of at work!

“Embracing the technology allowed me not only to hit my hiring goals, but created more free time to work on different projects and career development items and, in turn, led to a better work/life balance.”

 

Sara watched her whole team embrace Grayscale and take a huge sigh of relief for the first time since the pandemic started.

“The more our team members used Grayscale, the more they saw success, and vice versa, the more success they saw, the more they used it! While the hiring goals were still there, the recruiters felt a part of the weight lifted off their shoulders with Grayscale doing some of the heavy lifting for them.”

 

Sara quickly became a raving fan of Grayscale and was excited to see what else they could do.

 

With Sara’s help, Wayfair piloted Grayscale for just about everything!

With the rapid success Sara and her team were seeing using Grayscale to fill these high-volume roles, they wanted to see what kind of magic they could bring to their organization-wide hiring processes.

Sara helped embed Grayscale into their Hiring Event workflow, as well as the Candidate Re-engagement process. Both of these processes used Grayscale as the first form of outreach for their existing candidates.

The team at Wayfair started using Grayscale as the first form of communication for just about everything, from hiring events to reengagement efforts. It all started with a text!

As the team watched candidates embrace text-only communication, Sara and her coworker joined together to create a text-only phone screen/phone interview. With massive success, Sara is proud to say they were able to create a Text-Only hiring event!

“Candidates were prompted to register for a virtual hiring event and then complete the interview via text (utilizing a series of templates!). Grayscale was used throughout the entire ‘phone screening’ process to pre-qualify a candidate, and then the recruiter would call the candidate once they were qualified to be hired for the role.”

 

With the entire TA team becoming raving Grayscale fans, other departments caught wind of their success and opted to incorporate texting into their own workflows to send reminders and easily keep track of vital information.

 

The good news doesn’t end there!

Sara mentioned that prior to the implementation of such a deeply integrated and rich tool like Grayscale, she simply wouldn’t have had time or headspace to create, experiment with, and pilot these new text-based workflows to help expedite the process and increase candidate engagement.

Ready to get your team on Grayscale?