Merrin Mueller: We face you know, high turnover.
With high turnover, and that's natural for the
industry that we're in -- the food industry --
when you face that, you face having to hire in at
a high volume. One we have paperless onboarding.
So I think that's something that's, you know, very
important. But then when I built a team of
recruiters, I have a recruiting manager Sarah
Smoot, who you know, really runs the team and is
amazing. And they would call every person coming
in through our ATS system and we just started to
really monitor their life and you know, what their
work life-balance is and, and so in there, we just
said hold on, you know, like, "We need more than
just a phone call." Because sometimes they don't
answer or when they're calling back, it could be
dinner for them, things like that. And so we, you
know, reached out to TextRecruit, which is the
platform that we use to implement, being able to
reach out by text message. There's two different
ways that it can happen. If it's just the
recruiter, if someone goes to jobs.domino.com and
applies and it comes through our ATS system, we
capture their, their phone number's captured so we
can, and that's where we can reach out to them by
text message. And, but then there's another way
and this is where it goes beyond the recruiter.
And what we call Dottie and she's actually a robot
as when I call her and text her crew. It's there,
they call her, well, they call it Ari. But, but
this is where it's a robot that we had to train,
in a sense, but and you'll see here it says, "Text
Dotty to 297211". And as an applicant, when you
see that, when you text it, that's them engaging
with the text. And then it's an automatic response
back. And then too, you can take it a step
further, where not only have we trained the robot
area, it's a chat box, in a sense, but you know
how to respond. My recruiters can also watch those
conversations, and they can click in and click out
at any time. One of the biggest when first looking
at it, I had, you know, talk to TextRecruit and
said, "You know, I just, I don't think we're going
to be able to do this, but set, you know, who do
you guys work with?" And they couldn't send me
obviously certain details, but who do you guys
work with? And they, you know, had --plus, you
could look it up on their website. So I started
just doing my own research and going on there, you
know, they had a guarantee of a 37% response rate.
And I thought that was low. And so I said, I just
started doing research. And I just said, "You
know, I think we can make this happen." Because
what you would see is you would only see a piece
of paper that said, "Text, whatever their key word
was, to that number," but it would be sitting on a
window next to the hours of operations or there
was nothing that really grabbed your attention.
And so I said, you know, how can I said, I think
we can figure this out. So created a character.
Her name is Dottie. That's what we actually made
our key word is text "Dottie" and so we made her
our official recruiter for the face of RPM Pizza.
And so creating that marketing campaign, plus, you
know, print material, social media, whatever that
is, and getting the team trained up took about six
months to do but about a month to implement. And I
had three months to prove if there was an ROI
there and it proved itself in a month. Our
results, you know, like I said, the 37% response
rate and coming in, we were sitting at a 90 --
technically 92 -- but on average a 90% response
rate, which is unheard of for for any of their
customers. So our turnover started -- when I
joined the company -- was at 200%. So again, I've
been on a mission to, to really, you know, figure
out ways to change the culture. And so and there's
a lot of factors that go into that, there's no one
magic trick, it's a lot of magic. But where this
comes into play with turnover is that it sets the
stage, just like anything anyone would do when
meeting someone that they want, you know, like,
that they're going to build a relationship with is
that not only you know, that this is, it's
engaging, it's quick, it's efficient. And it's,
you know, it's, it's what they want. And so,
that's where it starts it off. And then what we do
is it helps keep ourselves internally accountable
for giving that same experience, all the way
through if they stayed with us for 30 more years.
One thing that it really helps, you know, drive is
knocking out, you know, applicants who don't fit
our criteria. And so, you know, something as
simple as you know, a teenager who wants to drive
for us, you know, and they're not of age. And so
that question is in there. And so what happens is
that, you know, we might have 100 people coming
in. And, but we don't have -- Dottie is able to
ask a certain, you know, a couple of questions.
And so maybe 20 drop off from there because maybe
they weren't of age to drive, right? So then we're
dealing with 80, the recruiters are, they're doing
a little bit of a pre-screen. And so, for the most
part, everyone actually, you know, will pass and
it just determines, comes down to like backgrounds
and things like that, but so it makes it a lot
more efficient and quicker in that way. And with
mass people, also you can do campaigns with this
system. So I can, one of the recruiters can
actually be talking to multiple people at one
time. And through the text messaging, of most of
the times when they're doing that, they're using
the system on their computer. It just seems to be
a little bit easier for on their side. But, so
that's also exciting, being able to handle all of
that. You have to train her on key words. And so,
I mean, I don't think you could really create
anything that just like, you know, someone's got
to give it the information and the knowledge. So,
so that's where, you know, our recruiting team,
when you know we're when they were testing and
things like that. They were keeping up with what
people were responding back with. And, and so we
have a lot of, we would call them bloopers where
we go whoops. And we would, you know, call
TextRecruit and go, "hey, we've got to restructure
these questions. We've got to, you know, add in
some more key words and when these key words are
picked up, here's the response back." And so
that's where there's a lot of training that you
have to do. But when it's going, I mean, it's,
it's not an every, maybe in the beginning. It's
more often, but it's uh, it gets easier as time
goes by.