How to boost grocery outlet applicant flow

Many entrepreneurs struggle to recruit and retain employees, particularly in the food retail and grocery industry. There are roughly 4.8 million employees working in almost 40,000 establishments in the US alone - presenting stiff competition during the hiring process. We were thrilled to hear from Pleasant Hill Grocery Outlet (managed by Jason Olson and Kathy Olson) as they shared about how they use Workstream to increase their total applicant pool by 81% while getting higher quality candidates. Most interestingly, sifting through all these retail and grocery store applicants didn't add any additional time. The Olsons use Workstream to automate the screening and scheduling process, so they can fill roles in a fraction of the time. Watch and learn how they did it!

Grocery Outlet was founded in the late 40s. We’ve grown to just over 300 stores now across six different states. Each store is owned and independently operated. It’s a great business and we love it. We love providing jobs to 30 employees in our community that are here with us. They’ve become part of our family.

Something that we struggle with, which probably a lot of smaller companies as well as large ones do, is hiring – the hiring process. Just trying to attract people, qualified people, and vetting the people. One of the beauties about Workstream is that they simplified that for us. Everything is computer-based, and we can simply work with Workstream to come up with a variety of questions to ask the applicants.

Previously, we’ve hired mainly using social media platforms, Facebook, things like that. Walk-ins off the street that we offer an application to. And since using Workstream, we have hired seven really good quality candidates.

So not only can you vet your employees, have emails and resumes coming to you, you can respond through text message and email without even giving your personal cell phone number out. It’s all through the system.

Workstream has been a great benefit to us. It’s helped in hiring people, saving us lots of time and money, having less turnover, having more quality candidates, and it saves us from hunting down the street for employees that may or may not have lasted for us. So we’re very happy with it.

Quite honestly, my wife and I want to say a shoutout to Workstream, a big ‘thank you’. Because it really has helped us through our entire application and hiring process. Its ease and speed, which is all about our retail experience. We couldn’t be happier with the programme. It’s saved us a ton of time, and you know, time is money in this business. As much as we love what we do, if we can expedite certain tasks, we’re more than happy to do it. And Workstream’s been a wonderful partner in helping us achieve that.

Workstream tip: Our dashboard/app has different features to address various hiring challenges. Learn from Grocery Outlet's success (as well as our other retail and grocery clients, such as Gelson's Market, Sports Basement, and H&M) and find out how we can help with your business needs.