We sat down with Colleen Campbell, Director, People Systems & Technology at Chobani, to chat about why they incorporated Grayscale into their recruiting process, what they have learned, and where they are headed next.

The talent acquisition team at Chobani is responsible for filling a lot of reqs, 72% of which consist of hourly employees in hard-to-fill roles.

 

“Working for an organization whose North Star is innovation, it was always a puzzle to me regarding why we weren’t texting so much sooner!”

– Colleen Campbell

 

Colleen notes that they were actively doing a lot to attract and retain talent, but their systems were outdated and the TA division as a whole was behind.  She hoped that by bringing texting to the table, they could revolutionize the culture of Chobani’s TA team while modernizing and accelerating their hiring process to stay competitive.

Chobani’s talent pool consists of a lot of applicants who speak English as a second language. They are often hesitant to respond to formal emails and usually aren’t checking email with any frequency. Colleen wanted to explore texting as a more approachable communication channel to quickly build relationships and keep their candidates engaged at scale.

With a lot of texting options out there, Chobani was looking for something that would complement their current tech stack. As an SAP SuccessFactors customer, they were looking for an easy-to-deploy, robust integration with a trusted partner. During their research, they found Grayscale.

 

“The implementation plan you gave us just looked way too easy. I told my IT contact that this was going to be a disaster… it was just too easy. I thought something had to be wrong.”

 

Chobani has extensive compliance requirements, and Colleen expected the process to drag on for a while. When Grayscale flew through the procurement process and the product was integrated and rolled out in a matter of weeks, Colleen was beyond surprised.

 

Where They Started With Texting

As the Chobani team got started, they were blown away by the level of ease that accompanied the implementation, onboarding, and ramp up time of all their team members.

During implementation, they pre-populated a number of shared templates to help her team kick off their texting experiences with style and ease.

 

From start to end, Chobani and the team went from signed contract to texting candidates in 30 days.

Once they were up and running, Colleen asked the team to get started with 1:1 messaging. Colleen encouraged the team to supplement additional comms (anything not email-centric, i.e., signing an offer letter) with texts.

After seeing some quick wins and massive success early on, they implemented Nudges. Think of Nudges as automated reminders to candidates. This ensured they never missed a follow-up with candidates throughout the hiring process.

From there, Colleen was looking to double down on SMS as a channel. She opted to set up Automations to help standardize their entire candidate journey, from application to onboarding.

 

Within days of implementing texting, her team was seeing a 62% response rate with an average response time of 10 minutes.

One of Colleen’s favorite parts of this experience has been seeing her team react! With easy reporting that is automatically emailed to all users every week, her team is challenging each other to increase their individual open rates, send more messages, and compete for the top of the leaderboard.

“High-volume recruiting can be a really challenging role. Seeing my team come alive at work and get excited about the tools we have is so refreshing and energizing.”

 

Where The Magic Has Taken Them

One of Colleen’s main goals was to decrease their time-to-fill. With the help of Grayscale, they are moving at double time!

 

“It used to take the team two weeks to fill a hiring class and now they fill one every single week.”

 

Colleen’s team used to hire four or five people a week, but recently, they have been seeing as many as 30 new hires come through the door weekly. Going from 4-5 new hires a week to 30, is a 500% increase in their overall speed, which has the team eager to see what else Grayscale can do!

After seeing instantaneous results in their volume hiring, they decided to give it a try with their internal recruiting efforts too.

Historically, Chobani’s internal candidates would drag their feet on signing their updated offer letters. Colleen’s team would spend hours each week tracking down and reminding employees to sign. It wasn’t uncommon for them to have 20-30 outstanding offer letters waiting to be accepted.

When the team implemented Grayscale’s Nudge feature for automatic follow-ups and reminders, they were shocked to see that they only had one offer letter unsigned.

 

With a 95% decrease in outstanding offer letters, Chobani’s recruiters can spend less time herding cats and more time building authentic relationships with their candidates.

Not only are they seeing drastic changes on the internal recruiting side, but they are facing some unprecedented problems in other areas of their business.

This hyper-efficiency in the hiring process has left Colleen and the team scratching their heads. Now, they are looking for creative ways to bring this level of speed and ease into the onboarding process!

Colleen is thrilled to be facing these new and unprecedented challenges as their TA team and processes are evolving to keep up with the times.

 

What’s Next For Chobani

Colleen mentioned that their first goal was to use texting to help accelerate the speed at which they can get people in the door and hired.

With that problem solved, the Chobani team has now set their sights on a different horizon.

 

“Now we have the luxury of considering what else we can add to this process to make our candidate experience incredible, and seeing the way this tool has energized our recruiting team is amazing to watch.”

 

While Chobani is exploring opportunities to use Grayscale in their onboarding process and beyond, they are already making plans to roll out texting for their intern recruitment team.

As the TA team is riding the wave of HR innovation, they have brought their 17-page job application down to a much simpler 12-question application. With a tight focus on promoting candidate engagement and creating rave-worthy candidate experiences, they are so excited about having a powerful, results-based tool in their pocket to reach their audience.

 

“We love baby G!”

 

Ready to see what texting can do for your team?