Nick Venzon's restaurant group operates 16 Jimmy John's locations in the South Bend, Indiana area. He and his two partners have been with Workstream since April 2019 — among the platform's earliest franchise customers. In that time, the group has grown from 9 stores to 16.
When the group acquired its first nine stores, hiring ran through Snagajob. Application volume was the core problem. "You'd be excited if you got an application, like, once per week," Nick said. "We kind of felt a little helpless." Without a reliable candidate pipeline, the group had limited ability to replace underperforming staff. "When you buy a group of nine stores, there's people that you feel like aren't great and you want to replace them, but then you're looking at: where am I getting people from?"
Onboarding created a separate bottleneck. Nick's HR department is based two hours from South Bend. Every new hire required a paper packet filled out at the store, mailed to the office, and entered manually into the HR system. A missed signature meant scanning the packet back, getting a re-sign, and restarting the clock. "It would probably take about a week, week and a half from hire to actually being in the system," Nick said. In the worst cases, candidates didn't wait. "Sometimes you'd have somebody fill out paperwork and then by the time they were allowed to start, they'd be gone."
The group switched to Workstream in April 2019. Today they rely on two core capabilities: the Talent Network for sourcing and the digital onboarding flow for paperwork.
Talent Network
Lets managers filter for specific candidate profiles and send targeted invitations to apply. For planned hiring, Nick instructs general managers to open the process on Mondays and close it by Friday. Applications come in, interviews run mid-week, and the offer goes out by the end of the work week. For urgent gaps, the Talent Network compresses the timeline much further. When two delivery drivers left within days of each other, Nick's team used it to source, interview, hire, and have a replacement start within 24 hours. "We haven't had that fail us yet," Nick said.
Digital Onboarding
Solved the two-hour HR gap. Nick's team worked directly with Workstream to build a digital process that matched their operational setup. Paper packets are gone. New hires complete all onboarding paperwork on their phones. The HR department receives it automatically, and it goes into the system immediately. "Now everything is a click away as far as somebody getting hired on their phone or on their computer," Nick said. "It's put in the system automatically and it's done."
The Talent Network changed the group's hiring leverage from the first month. "When we signed up and started getting more applicants in, we were a lot more flexible on who we wanted to keep," Nick said. That flexibility carried through seven years of growth: 9 stores to 16, each expansion supported by Workstream.
Paper onboarding took a week to a week and a half, with error-driven delays adding more time on top of that. Digital onboarding takes minutes. The change also eliminated a category of attrition unique to the paper process: candidates who completed their paperwork but quit before the mail lag cleared.
The broader ownership network that includes Nick's stores spans more than 200 locations and has migrated entirely to Workstream.