Chat with Colleen Campbell of Chobani

June 2, 2023

We recently joined the SuccessFactors East User Group in Pennsylvania. Grayscale was invited to give a presentation about the product. Here’s the interview between Grayscale Director of Partnerships, Charles Porges, and Senior Director of People and Talent Systems at Chobani, Colleen Campbell.

Feel free to listen to the clip in podcast style here.

Charles:
Tell us a little bit about your background. You’ve been at Chobani a while, but you have 10 years of experience in TA and People Systems, so give us your background and tell us a bit about your role at Chobani.

Colleen:
Let’s start with Chobani. So, Chobani is a global provider of food with our mission and vision being “making good food for all”. Our Founder and CEO Hamdi Ulukaya started Chobani by just offering Greek Yogurt, but now we have many more offerings. We have two small manufacturing plants, a corporate office in Soho, a small population in Australia, and an even smaller population in Mexico. Chobani is a brand and it’s a brand company.

I joined Chobani two years ago and my background is much more focused on change management, HR leadership, business processes, and I’ve leaned toward technology. When I joined Chobani, they were looking at implementing all seven modules of SuccessFactors, Qualtrics, Qualtrics 360, and Kronos as quickly as they could.

So, during the pandemic, we implemented all seven modules of SuccessFactors within six months. The entire implementation was done remotely without any in-person meetings, with an offshore partner who was also navigating the challenges posed by the pandemic.

We look at what we’re doing now as easy compared to, you know… that. With everything implemented, we continue to look at room for improved processes, which is how we arrived at Grayscale.

Charles:
As the director of people systems, tell us a little bit about the KPIs or outcomes you’re focused on.

Colleen:
I think it’s all the same things that I’m assuming TA leaders are focused on, there are several key factors: How fast can we get people? How can we get the most qualified people? How can we have a high-quality recruiting experience?

Charles:
Tell us a bit about the types of roles you’re hiring for and what are some of the challenges that come along with that kind of hiring.

Colleen:
So, the company dynamic is 72% hourly workers, on the floor, making products (yogurt, oat milk, creamers, etc.), and the rest would be all the things you would envision: creative, marketing, finance, and R&D. Two very different dynamics.

Charles:
How did you first come up with the idea of texting these candidates?

Colleen:
It’s funny, when hearing from our own population and hearing about our experiences we realized we hadn’t really been in pain. We had a wonderful brand and a wonderful offering, and then suddenly, the world changed. We no longer could be complacent with relying on emails and “old-school phone”, so we looked into texting/SMS. Really, we were looking for a way to interact with candidates in a different way.

Charles:
How did you hear about Grayscale?

Colleen:
We have a kind of internal rule which is that we only integrate to SuccessFactors with standard integrations with companies that have already been in the ecosystem. We were not interested in being early adopters. We worked closely with the SuccessFactors team, and they shared the companies in the space. News flash, there’s not a lot! We were then connected to Grayscale which met all our requirements, plus gave us new ideas that are still coming to fruition. It really was that relationship with SuccessFactors that was critical for us to be able to have those conversations.

Charles:
With partners, it’s always a question of, all right, I see the value, but how long is this going to take to get up and running. How quickly did you get up and running with Grayscale? And how quickly did you start seeing value?

Colleen:
Okay. I’m sure all of you in the room get hundreds of emails from vendors and salespeople saying how they can do this for you, saying how easy it’s going to be, saying “if you’re not doing this, you should be doing this”, and saying “your competitors are doing this”. You become a little skeptical when the sales team told us, this is how it’s going to be. But, let me tell you, Grayscale literally was as simple as they said.

There are a lot of internal stakeholders. You have the CIO engaged, legal engaged, your integrators engaged, and a third party too. There are a lot of people asking a lot of questions when getting any tech integrated, but Grayscale really felt like a simple plug-and-play. The slide deck during the kickoff meeting said it would be four weeks, and we were promised that we’d be able to get going. Little did they know, I had a whole separate secret plan of what was really going to happen. But no, it happened just like what was told on the slide deck. It was amazing!

Charles:
We have a lot of HRIS experts in the room digging in specifically to integration. What was the ease of getting the product integrated on the back end?

Colleen:
It was the easiest integration we’ve ever done with SuccessFactors. I called my partner on the IT side and asked if he had another meeting tomorrow. He said, no it’s done. It’s up and running. And I said, well, have you done the testing? Yeah! Didn’t you just start it yesterday morning? Yeah! Okay… Am I missing something? I mean, we literally both were like, this doesn’t make any sense.

Charles:
After implementation, what were some of the initial challenges you faced and addressed?

Colleen:
From a business challenge, it was like just go. We worked with the Grayscale team who did excellent training and provided all the right documentation. They just kept it simple. You don’t really need to spend a ton of time trying to help people. We immediately tackled a significant pain point, which was candidate drop-off. We also thought about ways to engage the 70% of the hourly workforce that learned English as a second language.

Another piece that’s important with Grayscale is the metrics that you get. Users get a report every week and it’s as simple as can be, showing the key things you would already ask about. We can easily see that when a recruiter sends a text, 80% of the contacts respond within 4 hours.

Charles:
Integration and implementation are one story, but adoption is another, and it’s essential for successfully adopting any new technology. How did you drive adoption amongst your recruiting team?

Colleen:
They did it for themselves. We did set up separate teams based on our plants, with a specific team chat around Grayscale. In the chat, people would share their learnings and share best practices. Grayscale did a great job setting up templates and building the standard things that we were already using in the email. Having that done paired with our brilliant newer generation of thinking was great. Our teams would share things amongst themselves saying, I did this, and this is how it worked, and I did this, and this is how it worked. I’m actually pretty sure there were recruiting contests between our plants on who could get the most responses, and who could get things moved forward quicker.

Charles:
How did Grayscale impact those business challenges you mentioned on both the high-volume side at the plants and the more white-collar office staff positions?

Colleen:
We do surveys using Qualtrics for our candidates, and those numbers went much higher than they had ever been. We asked things like: Were you satisfied with how quickly you heard from somebody? Did your experience align with the brand that you understand? Did your manager welcome you to the company? Those kinds of things clearly showed the increased candidate experience.

Also important, on the other side was our number of roles to fill. We had a significant number to meet, and I’m pretty confident that our leaders didn’t think we were going to get there because we hadn’t needed to before. The recruiting team ended up meeting all their goals, which meant we were meeting our production goals, which meant we were meeting the sales goals, etcetera. It really had a great company-wide impact.

Charles:
So, improved candidate surveys, meeting hiring goals with faster time to fill. Were there any other key metrics worth sharing?

Colleen:
We don’t have a good way to measure, but the efficiency of the recruiters, and the amount of time and effort it takes to make one hire went down. We’re happy about that!

Charles:
A birdie told me that you’ve been sort of MacGyvering Grayscale and using it for some use cases beyond just recruiting. Can you share a little bit about that?

Colleen:
So, we are MacGyvering, and I made sure it was okay to do so!
The way our process works is that you’re working with the recruiter through the hiring process and then you get moved to someone else when you go into the onboarding module. So, you have this feeling where you’re texting, you feel like you know your recruiter as it’s very personalized and then you come into onboarding and boom! You’re back to email, with a different person.

We looked at this and were like, this doesn’t make any sense. It’s clunky from a communication perspective. What we said was, well, why can’t the folks onboarding continue to use Grayscale? It’s already the conversation tool we’ve been using to communicate with these candidates.

We’ve set up some of our templates for onboarding and the continued texting interaction has been great! Texts like “Where to go when you come to the plant?”, and “Where’s your orientation?”, those kinds of things have been helpful. More important, though, is the ability of the candidates to ask quick questions.

On top of using Grayscale for hiring, we’re using it from an onboarding perspective as well and we’ve got some ideas on some other things to try! We’re thrilled with the added interactions which have led to reduced ghosting that happens on the operating side.

Charles:
Well, you guys are ahead of the game! We constantly hear requests about when we will be integrated with onboarding, and it’s worth sharing that our answer is: it’s on our road map for later this year!

You’ve driven a lot of business outcomes in just the first few months of using Grayscale. Texting or no texting, Grayscale or no Grayscale. What do you have your sites on next?

Colleen:
World domination! Haha!

From an employee perspective, it’s just continual. It’s ensuring that we meet the needs of our employees. We place a strong emphasis on diversity, inclusion, and equity within our organization. We also are very focused on the challenges for refugees. We have an innate understanding and drive to think about how we can get to that population in a quick and easy way. These people come to the country with nothing, and the first thing they get is a phone. If that’s the way we can get to them, then that’s what we’re going to do.