Data-driven hiring with Alejandra Mier of Coupa Café

Daniel Blaser (00:05):

Hello and welcome to On the Clock, presented by Workstream. If you care about hiring and retaining hourly employees, you're in the right place. I'm Daniel Blaser, and today I'm clocking in with Alejandra Mier. Alejandra is part of the management team at Coupa Cafe, a quick service restaurant chain with eight locations in the Palo Alto, California area. Coupa Cafe also has the important distinction of being work stream's first customer. We discuss what Alejandra has found to be the most important factors for hiring and retaining employees, why she recommends researching the pay and benefits of competing businesses, and how Coupa Cafe uses data to forecast their future hiring needs. Coupa Cafe kind of plays a special role, like within work stream's history. Can you kind of discuss maybe what motivated, you know, the embrace of hiring automation, whether it was workstream or like other tools, you know, automat shin tools as well, like why is that something that matters to Coupa Cafe?

Alejandra Mier (01:04):

Yes, so we certainly play a special role in work stream's history as your first customer and I was here to experience it all. Yeah, our re recruiting structure was such a slow process before we started using workstream as our hiring automation. So we would use different Excel spreadsheets trying to keep track of the candidates. When did we call them? What did they say if they were even interested and need, needless to say, our hiring process was not working out and taking up a lot of our time. So we decided to invest in an easy automation system, and that's when I met your co-founders. I met your co-founders in the early building stages of the company. They would come to our office in Palo Alto and collaborate with our onsite recruiter. So workstream has been a game changer for us. We now have like all this information on one platform and everyone on the team who needs to be involved in the recruiting process has access to real-time information instead of asking our recruiter for updates. I'm not sure if you ever heard the term of this meeting should have been an email <laugh>. So that has eliminated that entirely for us.

Daniel Blaser (02:19):

That's really cool. That's awesome. Looking back and, and maybe there's, you know, the answer to this question, there's some overlap, but you know, with what you just said, but if you're look, looking back on the last four to five years or so, what would you say is the number one thing you've learned personally about what hourly workers are looking for in a role and looking for when they're decide to stay in a, you know, at a company?

Alejandra Mier (02:44):

Honestly, pay is the utmost importance for hourly employees. They're looking to see how much they're gonna make at the company. That is the number one important thing that I've learned that keeps them happy is making sure that they're paid well. Secondly, they're looking for flexibility in their work schedule. So right now we offer competitive wages and our customers here tip generously. So we also have a tip pool for our hourly employees. So everyone gets a piece of the tip. And also we have offered the ability to change their work availabilities saying like what days they wanna work and times instantly. So if an employee has second job and needs to get somewhere by 4:00 PM we'll let them be off by 3:00 PM So a lot of times they'll have the second job, they will have other priorities, family gotta pick up their kids. So us being super flexible to their outside responsibilities has worked in our favor and we found that they appreciate it as well. And I feel like has helped with our turnover rate as well.

Daniel Blaser (03:56):

You know, you, you mentioned all of the things that are important to hourly employees. How do you make sure that they see those as benefits in the kind of the sourcing stage or in job descriptions or whatever? Can you talk about like, you know has that been something you've been able to communicate effectively, do you feel like kind of early on in the process?

Alejandra Mier (04:18):

Yeah, so actually earlier this year in January, California passed this new law where we have to actually post how much employees would be making as opposed as before, we wouldn't, and a lot of of our competitors wouldn't as well. So we kind of use that as our advantage to see what our competitors in the area are paying their employees and kind of pay a little bit more than that or equally the same. And then also let our candidates know that we have a tip pool and how much they are making currently on average. We have a location right now on Stanford that they make up to $35 an hour with tips.

Daniel Blaser (04:54):

Kind of mentioned this a second ago, but you know, something I hear a lot from our customers non-customers is just the importance of management and like how having a good manager is kind of a key component of employee satisfaction or retention, all that good stuff. What would you say are like some of the most important traits that are shared by great managers?

Alejandra Mier (05:17):

Some important traits? Well, I feel like the most important trait is having good communication. And when I say communication, I mean having good writing skills, listening skills, and even computer skills. Also being bilingual in our industry is an important trait for us as well. Thirdly, I would say a good trait is being available to your employees on your team. Some of our employees will call out sick late at night. We'll text message us late at night, early in the morning, so being able to respond to them quickly. So being flexible with your own schedule to accommodate the employees is also an important trait for effective managers.

Daniel Blaser (05:57):

What would you say are some of the negative traits that maybe stand in the way of successfully managing hourly employees?

Alejandra Mier (06:04):

The lack of experience in their leadership role. It's important to have a leader in charge that knows how to handle difficult situations, from how to discipline employee on how to handle conflicts with employees or even customers is important to us. If we have a leader that lacks that kind of experience and we wanna move them up or promote them, then we'll give 'em training to help them feel more comfortable in their new leadership role. We use this great platform called tipsy.com. It's T-Y-P-S-Y and it's this hospitality training online. It has videos a lot of good information for new leaders and anyone in our industry. They have course from like customer service, beverage and service for price ranges, really reasonable from like seven to $11. So we use that as a resource for leaders that may need a little bit more training.

Daniel Blaser (07:02):

Another example of, of Coupa Cafe being kind of on the, the cutting edge of technology using, you know, a cool platform rather than A-A-V-H-S in the back room or something like that. One other trend that I've been chatting with different people about is just this idea of proactive hiring versus reactive hiring. Is that something that, that idea kind of something that seems familiar to you, maybe something that you've been focused on in your role? And if so yeah. How, how have you kind of approached that?

Alejandra Mier (07:35):

Yes, so we do proactively hire based on last year's sales. So we forecast our busiest months. For example, for us it's graduation month at Stanford University and October are the busiest times of the year for us as opposed to the winter season when it's the slowest. So we will use this information and we'll do a hiring freeze before the winter season, and then we'll make sure we're fully staffed before the summer in April. Anticipating these type of changes is really critical for our hiring.

Daniel Blaser (08:08):

That's really smart to use. You know, kind of the past performance, do you find that the trends hold across all your locations or like there's different locations that are a little bit different?

Alejandra Mier (08:18):

Yes, usually they do. For instance, graduation month at Stanford kind of affects all of the locations around Palo Alto, which is where we have Coupa Cafe but mainly based in Palo Alto, then some outside, but you'll see the same traffic and busyness around the same time, but mostly in Palo Alto and at Stanford locations.

Daniel Blaser (08:40):

How do you effectively initiate a hiring freeze? Like, can you kind of walk through like, okay, well we're actually not going to be hiring for the next month or two. How do you, how are you able to do that without having it negatively impact the scaling back up that you mentioned?

Alejandra Mier (08:57):

So we will still have an active job post on the platforms. We'll still use workstream, we'll still make sure we're posting, so we'll have a pool of candidates for when we are ready. We won't necessarily let our candidates know that we're in a hiring freeze or let our employees know. Just the leaders and management group know that we're won't be hiring anytime soon just because we're anticipating it to be slow the next month or two.

Daniel Blaser (09:23):

Oh, okay. Yep, that makes sense. So you're still building that applicant pool for, for down the road, so yeah, that definitely makes sense. The listeners to this podcast on the clock, it's primarily people just like you. They're concerned about finding and hiring hourly employees, retention all of that good stuff. And I just wanted to give you maybe the opportunity to share like a word of advice or something from your experience that you feel like this audience, you know, could use in their jobs.

Alejandra Mier (09:56):

Definitely. I would say if you're having trouble hiring, I would take a look at your competitors and see what they're offering. I mentioned this before taking a look at job postings of your competitors down the street or around the corner or even the same city in the same industry, and looking to see what their paying, what sort of benefits they're offering their employees and seeing if you could match that. 'cause A lot of times employees can go down the street and apply and get hired the next day if we're not offering something competitive or if we're offering even 50 cents less, they'll go with 50 cents more. Also I would say revamping your job post making small changes even to your wording or adding a logo, updating new photos even making a small change to your job posting can make the difference.

Daniel Blaser (10:45):

Yeah, I was gonna, just a quick follow up on that. Can you provide, do you have any examples off the top of your head of like small changes you made to job listings that like, you know, ended up seeming like they made a big impact?

Alejandra Mier (10:59):

Right. before our job postings were very long and extensive <laugh>, so we kind of narrowed it down to be just straightforward what they expect to be doing in terms of their responsibilities. We made it more attractive by taking new photos, better quality and adding that to the job post. And I feel like that gave it sort of like a little update and help for us to get a new pool of candidates and new interests to come in. And if you are having trouble retaining employees, I would say to conduct an exit interview after the employee has officially resigned to better understand why they're leaving your company if there's something you could change, prevents it from happening again, I would make those changes. Most of the time employees do leave because they're unhappy with their manager or supervisor. I have seen that be the biggest influence on why an employee decides to leave. So taking a look to see if there's a trend in certain department where employees are leaving or a location where employees tend to leave the turnover rate is high. I would speak to the general managers that are leaders in charge of that location or that department and speak to them and see why they think employees are quitting.

Daniel Blaser (12:14):

If you had a location where you were continually getting that feedback, do you have kind of a process in place or like what would you try to do next if it was like, man, we're really losing a lot of employees at location X because of, you know, this certain supervisor that's causing issues. Like what, what's the next step for you?

Alejandra Mier (12:36):

Usually for us when I've seen that happen, it's because the person in charge doesn't know how to handle employees. Maybe with their personal responsibilities outside of work or they don't know how to speak to them about their jobs. If maybe they're not performing, they don't give good feedback, they don't check in with them. So usually what we do is we retrain the leaders or the supervisors in that position they just need a little bit more attention and help and that's when we step in and try to give them what they need and the resources.

Daniel Blaser (13:10):

Thank you so much for, for chatting with me and, and sharing a little bit of your perspective and then also talking a little bit about work stream history 'cause that's always cool.

Alejandra Mier (13:19):

Yeah, definitely. I love being on here and thank you for having me.

Daniel Blaser (13:29):

Thank you for listening to On the Clock. For more info, visit workstream.us/podcast. I've also included a link in the show notes to connect with Alejandra on LinkedIn. Until next time, we're clocking out.