As Krispy Kreme aims to expand in the UK, its new talent attraction system is crucial to its growth

Krispy Kreme has halved its recruitment time, as well as reduced costs and improved the candidate experience following its implementation of the HirePad talent attraction system from Hire Strategies. Jodie Craig, HR manager of Krispy Kreme UK, told Recruiter that the system is central to the company’s growth plans of doubling in size. It previously took two months to advertise, sift through, assess candidates and conduct interviews when launching in a new region but HirePad has helped reduce this timeframe by three to four weeks.

“As a small, growing business, our operational managers have always been empowered to create their own recruitment solutions,” said Craig. “For many years, all management hires were sourced through recruitment agencies, and our team member applications were paper-based in store or CVs sent to a generic email address. From 2010, our growth plans took a seriously ambitious turn and we knew it was time to implement a much more effective way of sourcing and selecting candidates.”

The company, which started making its doughnuts in the US in 1937 and opened its first UK store in Harrods in 2003, plans to launch in two new regional markets a year across the country. Each launch comprises a facility to make and sell its fresh doughnuts daily, called a Hotlight Store, as well as up to 10 additional coffee bars. A region requires around 100 retail production and logistics specialists, as well as a 15-strong management team. 

HirePad was developed to address the disconnect that often exists between a candidate’s experience of using a company’s careers site to find a job and when they enter the applicant tracking system (ATS). “Companies often invest a fortune in their careers site and as soon as a candidate hits search or applies, the process is much more clunky,” said Peter Gold, managing director of Hire Strategies, who also developed one of the first ATSs back in 1999. He said that at this point candidates can often be lost. Gold explained that he also wanted to address the search engine optimisation issue, since if jobs are in an ATS they can’t be found by the search engines. HirePad pulls jobs from the ATS and sends them to various channels, making recruiters less reliant on the job boards to drive traffic. 

Whether candidates discover a job on Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or one of the aggregators, they are then sent to the careers site which uses familiar functionality such as Google Maps to enable them to find out more. There is also a mobile site which allows candidates to save a position to a job basket to apply later.

The largest proportion of traffic to the careers site currently comes from the aggregator sites at 33% but mobile is growing fast at 22%. The latter comes from a mix of mobile search, links from the Krispy Kreme corporate mobile site and direct mobile traffic. The company is also capitalising on its main Facebook page, which has well over 50,000 fans. “We know that more and more people are using mobile and tablet technology to access information they want in the way they want to see it,” Craig said.

The next stage is to further integrate Krispy Kreme’s recruitment process with social media channels. “To tap into passive candidate pools, develop peer-to-peer recommendations and convert those passionate advocates of our brand into potential colleagues,” explained Craig.