Lydia: Yes you can also do that. If you have the option of either using a tax professional and paying an hourly versus paying a percentage of what you get as tax credits, we've seen that in the percentage, people push harder to get this additional information. But you have the option and we can add the screening questions, with the screening questions they're pulled directly from the actual WOTC things so that prevents you from being discriminatory in your hiring practice. If you decide to just independently separate from Workstream that's also completely fine, I would just recommend to separate out the questions about are you an ex-felon or are you in the military from questions like are you receiving unemployment benefits and are you receiving TANF or SNAP so that people will actually check them if they are doing that versus as soon as they see ex-felon in the same question people just don't check anything so that's just a tip in general.
Tara: Yeah we just added a question at the end of our screening questions. It basically says we would love to meet you using your device please send us a short video 30 seconds or less letting us know more about you and why you want to work at Jamba. This is optional but appreciated and we used a file upload so they just have to take it on their phone and upload it and again, liability things we talked to the managers, we said when you download it and you watch it, past the download you delete it after that point but so far it's not been not been any problems there. I think Desmond you guys are probably working towards some other integrations where hopefully it won't be an upload and then download in the future but that was kind of the quickest way for us to get this going for now.
Panos: We still bring people in for a live interview once we've gone through all the stages.
Tara: We added the phone interview as a step but we still need them to come in, you still have to see them in person.
Jeff: Same for us. We do a lot of the interviews outside right where it feels I think a little bit more comfortable for everybody, but it's still a really important part of the process for us.
Panos: Well I can answer that. There's no real scientific basis behind it except just through about 100 applicants that we have brought onboard using the Workstream onboarding part of the app, we've been talking to the TSM's we've summarized that their savings at all levels from the interview process to how much time it takes to screen all the way to doing the paperwork remotely before they show up for, let's say the interview or before they get hired for the onboarding piece. All that savings from the GM time to the team member time savings not coming to the store to do the paperwork, we kind of blended that together and got our own rate of about $45 in Arizona. It's probably a little bit less in California because there's different laws and regulations and different states that you have to conform to, but that was our own internal figure and what we've talked about and kind of came down to the wire it's about $45 in Arizona for a candidate.
Jeff: I won’t try to rank them but I would do an overarching statement. I measure the success by this, a good portion of it by how happy my GM's are. A GM's job right now is a complex job, it's a challenging job and when they tell me that something we're providing them is saving them time, is making it easier for them to do those jobs, it's making it easier for them to find team members, it's making it easier for them to retain team members, it's hard to put a number on that but I consider that sentiment from my general managers to be priceless so I put general managers satisfaction at the top of my list.
Tara: I would echo that, I think that there's very few things and there's a lot of times we'll roll out things for the sake of our office or our price or our profit or something. There's very few things we roll out that the managers are ecstatic about and this was definitely one of them. So I think that the interview process which encompasses all of that time saving, cost savings, better hires that's all encompassed in getting them to that interview process and keeping them in the interview process. But yeah overall our team just they like it. Sometimes it takes a little nudging, sometimes they are hesitant, they're used to doing things a certain way but when you encourage them that this is really going to be easier for them in the end. I haven't had one come back to me and say now I actually want to go back to the other way but it's very good for them.
Jeff: I want to echo what Tara is saying there, it's really interesting you'd think that adopting technology would be really simple and easy just automatically but people do tend to fall back on what they're used to and so this does require some training and some a little bit of a nudge to adopt but to Tara’s point, once they adopted they're not going to go back.
Panos: Yeah it's really easily adopted by GMs and it's very intuitive I would say and if the GM's are happy like what Jeff and Tara said, we're happy. Because at the end of the day, they have a really tough job to do and any time you turn around lately there's something else going on. We have to close, reopen but the quality of the candidates and the fact that we're actually getting candidates in some markets through Workstream where we couldn't get candidates before. I think it opens it up to a whole new level. GMs would get frustrated with not being able to get quality candidates or any kind of candidates walking in through the door, this has increased the applicant pool and the quality and I think although we haven't measured the retention of the of the candidate that we do actually bring onboard, but the texting piece has been a godsend. I mean I've heard over and over again how intuitive it is and how easy it is has made their life so much more easier so the GMs love that piece.
Tara: You might think like oh they have to be logged in on Workstream or they have to be on their phone or something. What's beautiful about this is they can reply to an email so a candidate can text “Hey I can't make it today can i reschedule?” and the manager who might still be used to using email a lot and that's doing paperwork or whatever trying to reply to the email and it will text the candidate back. So it really flows between email and text which enables people to work the best way that they can. They can also not have to sit on the front line on their cell phone all the time.
Panos: Yeah it saves a ton of time, you can set up interview time slots and you can set up when the GM is available on the app to interview on during the same time, during the same day every week and then the interview. After you go through that, they can plug in their own interview times and it's kind of really cool. Yeah it's truly latest and the greatest.
Tara: Yes, there have been hiccups but I think because part of this is that you really build your own application so I want to reiterate that part to you as you build what works for you. But you could also use their template and so we've chosen to have multiple stages for that reason so that if they don't go through stage one then you're not really going to have them. Stage one is like the first couple questions you need, then we put a little bit and then we let them fill out a lot more with their availability and we kind of walk them through it so you do still see their information. If they get stuck and they don't go, there's automation to say hey if they've been here for a couple of days and they haven't filled this out what do you want me to do with them so again you really have to handhold the whole process, you might decide to send them a reminder you might decide that your best friend you're just going to move them right onto the phone interview, but I feel like we don't lose any candidates we just have to get in there and find out you know where they are.
Lydia: So there's preferred pricing for Workstream. I believe it starts at $60 per location with volume discounts, so as more Jamba people come on that price will go down and if you have more than a certain number of locations, it's already lower than $60 and it’s billed monthly. For WOTC, there's no cost up front, they try and maximize your Tax Credits and then after you receive the Tax Credits you get a bill for 20% of what you received in Tax Credits that you can apply in the next 20 years. So that's just part of Workstream and you can take advantage of it or not but definitely recommend filing for the Tax Credits either way.
Panos: The game changer really was how intuitive the app was. Initially there were some bugs as we kind of worked out the process but the game changer for my team was the savings in time and energy and how intuitive it really is. It's extremely intuitive.
Tara: As far as adding something for us, it was adding the requirement of flowing through to an interview, so it's kind of what we do again we did it almost everywhere. Prior to COVID we had to shift a little bit right now but we still are doing it for all of our shift manager positions because we feel like I don't care who you are, you better be interviewing qualified shift managers all the time right now. We don't have in our areas, we don't have an abundance of those so it really made our managers keep hiring top of mind because they had to have their calendar in there and they had to open to doing interviews otherwise the people would get to that point and they get stuck and they'd be messaging them hey I can't set up an interview it's sending me the automatic reminders so it was really our way of making sure our managers were doing what we wanted them to be doing every time. Once we figured out to do the automatic flow through to interviews and not give them an option where we needed to, that was pretty much a game changer for us.
Tara: We're not yet because we just didn't have the whole corporate thing set up so that's why we added the video and then we're just letting them decide whether or not they're doing zoom on their own I don't know or FaceTime or whatever. But I think most of them are just calling them, doing a quick interview and then moving them to the on-site interview stage which then again sets up that whole calendar, lets them pick their time come in remind them and process that whole so because we're doing two types of interviews now it's even more benefit to having both have reminders and ability to cancel and all that kind of stuff built in.
Tara: I don’t think I could put a number on that. We have quite a bit before this but I just thought of another big benefit that we didn’t mention. Workstream has an automatic email in the morning for that day's interviews and so a lot of times they'll forget that they scheduled interviews or someone will schedule it like late at night. So our team looks for that interview in the morning to remind them of all their appointments for the day. I think that's a big benefit for them. They have somewhere to message at the last minute and say hey sorry I can't make it and they're more likely to do that so it but it has helped.
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