Case Study
How one beverage manufacturing company used Team Engine to speed up their hiring process and improve employee communications, resulting in more direct hires and better retention.
Gregory Packaging Inc. SunCup Juice is a juice manufacturing, packaging, and distribution company, supplying portion-controlled juice to schools, daycares, elderly feeding, hospitals and prisons. The company employs 150+ people across four states, and is continuing to grow.
When Brittani joined SunCup Juice in the spring of 2021 as the HR Generalist, her main focus was to bring structure to existing processes, and implement in places where none previously existed. As a 100 year-old company still conducting most of their HR functions fully on paper, Brittani certainly had her work cut out for her.
No defined process for hiring
Not reviewing applicants quickly enough
Expensive subscription to ZipRecruiter
Communicating HR announcements
Guided hiring process & best practices
Automated texting with applicants
Advertise to a new, bigger job audience
Reduced time-to-hire
Increased direct hires
Reduced reliance on temp labor
Before Team Engine, the hiring process at SunCup Juice was not streamlined. Each location’s management team was responsible for staffing their departments which resulted in a heavy reliance on staffing agencies and temporary staffing agencies. The direct hire process was mainly focused on management positions through the corporate management team via ZipRecruiter. The process wasn’t inherently broken, but Brittani says it was just taking too long and was not efficient for the new job market they were seeing due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
The issue we were seeing was that there was too much time lapsing between when people were applying and when we first called them back.
Brittani Assise
HR Generalist, SunCup Juice
Part of the problem was that the recruiting and hiring process was not anyone’s main focus before Brittani started with SunCup; it was a shared responsibility among many.
ZipRecruiter was used for job postings and maintained by executive management, who did not have the extra time to dedicate to the job board on a daily basis. When the plant managers received resumes, they would take a few days to review the them, and then reach out for an initial interview. For management level positions, multiple interviews would then be needed for the candidate to meet with other managers. This process extended the timeline by weeks. Unfortunately, by then, half the applicants had already found jobs, or just didn’t respond at all.
Brittani wanted to retain the plant managers’ autonomy in interviewing and hiring their own staff. At the same time, she wanted to deliver to them a higher volume of qualified applicants in a more timely manner. And ultimately, she wanted to centralize the process so that she was responsible for the most time-sensitive tasks (like reviewing resumes and setting up interviews). Once she got comfortable with using Team Engine, she found that it provided all the tools she needed to do exactly that.
One key change that made a big difference was identifying a single point of accountability (Brittani) to keep the hiring process in motion at all times.
Now, Brittani handles all job postings and reviews the screened applicants that Team Engine qualifies for her. Then she sends an email to each plant manager once or twice a week with applicants for their location. They respond with their selections, then Brittani schedules interviews through Team Engine. After the interviews occur, the plant managers send her an update with start dates for the candidates they want to hire, and feedback for the candidates they decide to pass on. Then Brittani updates it all in Team Engine.
Although Team Engine supports the ability to add additional users (such as the hiring plant managers at each location) which could speed up the process even more, Brittani says she prefers to fully manage the process in Team Engine herself, for several reasons.
For one, this process ensures that Team Engine is being updated and used effectively, which will result in better data for recruiting analysis. Additionally, the Director of Operations and plant managers do not have the time (nor priority) to manage job postings, quickly review new resumes, and schedule interviews. The biggest reasons, however, are for control and speed.
We have seen that if we do not communicate with an applicant right away and get them in for an interview quickly, they will have already accepted another position by the time we reach out. With me in the driver seat, I make sure we are being as fast as possible.
Brittani Assise
HR Generalist, SunCup Juice
Already familiar with the benefits of texting applicants from a previous role, Brittani was quick to adopt text messaging as part of her hiring process in Team Engine. That one small change has dramatically reduced time to hire, since applicants now get back to Brittani much faster than before.
Previous to Team Engine we would make phone calls and follow-up with emails. We would either not hear back at all, or it would take a couple days to hear back from them. Now, we hear back within an hour, or next day at the latest.
Brittani Assise
HR Generalist, SunCup Juice
Brittani was also pleasantly surprised to discover that Team Engine automatically distributed job postings to all the major job boards for her. That resulted in expanded reach and more eyes on their open positions. Before Team Engine, she was extremely limited on the number of jobs she could have active at any given time in ZipRecruiter, even with the expensive package they subscribed to. Now, with Team Engine, they’re always recruiting for all positions, which keeps qualified applicants rolling in all hours of the day, and all days of the week.
The feedback we’ve received from our new hires about the text message communication is that it’s very quick, easy and user-friendly for them. It allows us to make a really good first impression with new employees.
Brittani Assise
HR Generalist, SunCup Juice
Brittani says this reduced time to hire, paired with higher quality and higher volume of applicants to select from, has ultimately resulted in more direct hires and significantly reduced their need for temp labor.
Before Team Engine, Brittani says the only regular communications they were sending out to staff were HR announcements about things like open enrollment dates and benefits eligibility. Since SunCup Juice only issues paper checks , attaching printed memos to check stubs was the most reliable way to communicate that information to the company at large across 4 states.
Printing memos with check stubs was time-consuming, used a lot of paper, and I never knew for sure if it was being seen. Team Engine has helped with all of those issues, and we’re communicating even more now about things like performance reviews, stay interviews, and other types of culture announcements.
Brittani Assise
HR Generalist, SunCup Juice
Brittani says the employees love having the ability to reach HR on text message, too—especially those who don’t work in the same location as the corporate office. It’s also helped at their newest facility where most of the management staff are new and still learning policies and procedures. It saves them time not having to communicate back and forth between HR and the employees when the employee can go straight to HR with questions via text message.
I’ve used other internal team texting software and Team Engine is better because it gives you the user-friendly ability to send automated messages based on hire date, employee surveys, and announcements. It’s very easy just to set all that up in the system and then not have to worry about remembering to send those reminders.
Brittani Assise
HR Generalist, SunCup Juice
Brittani is also a big fan of the reporting feature in Team Engine. She and the rest of the SunCup Juice leadership team find it especially helpful to be able to see how many applicants they’ve received and where those applicants were sourced from, as well as which sources bring in the most qualified applicants.
“We have seen now that some of our postings don’t get as much traction as some of our others, so we want to look into that and try to understand why that is, and what we can do to improve the performance of those applicant sources.”
When asked what made her decide to go with Team Engine, Brittani points out that her old process had a lot of extra manual steps that required her to jump in and out of different softwares. For her, Brittani says the game changer was the ability to send texts from her computer and do all the other hiring-related activities she needed to do—all in the same system.
What really stood out was how Team Engine meshed everything together. In one software, we could take an applicant all the way into new hire orientation, and then right into the onboarding process to becoming our employee. It’s all-in-one, very easy, simple, and everything flows together efficiently.
Brittani Assise
HR Generalist, SunCup Juice
Are you hiring for multiple locations like Brittani? Looking for ways to improve not only your recruiting process, but also your employee communication strategy? Sign up for a free, one-week trial of Team Engine with full access, no commitment, and no strings attached to see how we can help!
