The challenge

When you’re a major quick-service restaurant with stores nationwide, hiring never really slows down. Demand is constant, volumes are high, and the pressure to keep every location staffed with the right people is always on.

That was the challenge. The business needed to hire for critical in-store roles – from Baristas to Store Leaders – while balancing speed, consistency and candidate quality at scale. But with hundreds of hires needed every year, standard recruitment support was never going to be enough.

What they needed was a full-cycle RPO partner that could keep the process moving, improve efficiency, bring down cost and deliver a better experience for both candidates and hiring managers – without compromising on compliance.

They turned to PeopleScout.

The solution

We dived right in – with Affinix®, our proprietary technology being at the heart of our solution. Competency-based screening questions were introduced to automatically screen in and screen out candidates, making it easier to stack-rank talent from the start. Video interviewing, hiring manager self-scheduling and faster feedback loops all helped remove friction from the process and improve hiring efficiency.

Ongoing demand was supported by clustered talent pools built across store locations. That meant we could engage talent quickly and keep strong candidates warm for future openings.

And last but by no means the least, we also improved process, reduced reliance on traditional advertising and introduced more passive sourcing and long-term pipeline development.

Results

The impact couldn’t be ignored.

We delivered around 650 hires annually across the store network, while dramatically improving speed and efficiency across key roles. Our efforts resulted in a reduction in time-to-fill for Baristas fell by 51%, down to 17 days. For Store Leaders, time-to-fill dropped by 40%, reaching 37 days.

The process kept getting better. For Barista hiring, the interview-to-hire ratio improved from 5:1 to 4:1, showing stronger matching and better use of hiring manager time.

Beyond speed, the solution delivered 100% compliance across candidate management and onboarding, while monthly advertising costs were cut by 80% through passive sourcing and stronger talent pipeline development.