Coupa Cafe + Workstream

Coupa Cafe

Venezuelan siblings Camelia and Jean-Paul Coupal founded Coupa Cafe in 2004 after graduating from Stanford University. Focused on serving high-quality coffee and food, Coupa Cafe quickly became a favorite meeting place for startups, entrepreneurs, and students. 

Based in San Francisco, Coupa Cafe was voted the best coffee house in Palo Alto on Tripadvisor and is growing rapidly in the Bay Area. Since opening, the cafe franchise has expanded to eight retail locations with 250 employees. With the steady growth and the expansion to multiple locations came the realization that there was a need to make their hiring process more efficient.

Coupa Cafe was able to cut down their time to hire by 50% after partnering with Workstream. What approach did they take?

Camelia and Jean-Paul talk about hiring challenges and what the Workstream experience has been like for them.

Inefficient Hiring System

Due to the nature of the F&B industry, the annual turnover rate for hourly workers at Coupa Cafe was nearly 90%, leading to an urgent and constant need to hire new staff. In their early days, Coupa Cafe used an online Google form to manually fill up each new job application, which was a time-consuming process. Due to the size of their business, their onboarding and training methods were too traditional and inefficient to do the job well. Another challenge was documentation - the applicants’ information was not centralized for easy reference.

Streamlined Recruitment Process and Centralized Dashboard

Workstream ended up being the applicant tracking software solution that Coupa Cafe needed. It was determined that the company could utilize several of Workstream’s features to streamline their recruitment:

• Workstream simplified and improved the way Coupa Cafe managed their internal HR processes. With Workstream, Coupa Cafe was able to create an online application that could be posted on 10 job portals automatically for free.

• The Workstream dashboard allowed Coupa Cafe to better track hiring performance over time, providing applicant insights and helping to determine which job portals were most effective for them.

• The all-in-one hiring dashboard was also centralized so that they could see all pertinent information about the applicants in one place.

• Workstream's automated 2-way SMS communication allowed Coupa Cafe to respond and manage prospects more efficiently, enabling them to hire the right applicants faster.

Faster and Better Recruitment

Camelia and Jean-Paul share that their favorite Workstream features are the 2-way SMS, job board integrations, and organizational overview - all at a click of a button. By leveraging these and collaborating closely with Workstream, Coupa Cafe was able to:

• Reduce the amount of time spent on hiring by 50%
• Improve oversight over the entire hiring process due to the presence of a centralized dashboard
• Get more qualified applicants via more job posting channels
• Modernize documentation and keep track of applicant information

To sum it up: Coupa Cafe needed a platform that could help them streamline and achieve two goals: to ensure that the rate of recruitment could match the pace of their growth, as well as keep better track of the hiring process. With Workstream’s suite of customizable and automated features, they were able to meet the demands of their fast-paced and ever-changing industry. 

Workstream has collaborated with several other clients in the food delivery industry to create efficient solutions to their hiring challenges, such as Texas ToGo and ZeroCater. Find out what you can learn from their success stories and schedule a chat with us today.