Wendy Hull, Senior VP of HR at Salad Collective

 Daniel Blaser (00:07):

Hello and welcome to On the Clock, presented by Workstream. If you care about hiring, managing, and paying hourly workers, this is the podcast for you. I'm Daniel Blazer, and today we're clocking in with Windy Hole Senior VP of HR at the Salad Collective. The Salad Collective is a franchisor of 64 fast casual restaurant locations across three different brands. We talk about how Wendy's embraced technology in her role in order to make hiring and employee management easier for franchisees. We also talk about the power of integrations for accomplishing HR goals and much more. Enjoy. Let's kick things off by getting just what's your position? Talk a little bit about the company you work for, all that good introduction stuff.

Wendy Hull (00:54):

I have been with the Salad Collective for just over nine years. I am currently the senior Vice president of Human Resources in my nine year span. We have grown the Salad collective from one brand, which is a salad inspired concept called Mad Greens here in the Colorado, Arizona and Texas market. We acquired Snappy Salads in 2019, which is in Dallas. They're also a salad inspired concept concept. And then just recently last year we, or actually a little bit earlier than that, we acquired another brand called Tokyo Joes, which is a healthy Asian inspired concept. So the three different brands make up the Salad collective, so been great growth over the last nine years and exciting to continue to see more.

Daniel Blaser (01:55):

So how many total locations is that across? How many different states?

Wendy Hull (01:59):

Approximately 64. I oversee anything people wise, you name it, that touches head to toe from benefits comp, recruiting, labor compliance, law litigation, you name it. Anything that touches an employee that would ultimately touch the business is what I oversee Strategically over all three brands

Daniel Blaser (02:25):

Specifically, obviously for this conversation, I'd like to kind of go into the recruiting, the hiring, onboarding side of your role in that regard. What would you say are some of the biggest challenges that you face in your role?

Wendy Hull (02:44):

Oh, so we're operations driven. My focus is to support our operators in all three brands, and so it is to keep a good flow of applicants going, finding new ways to recruit talent and support our operators with making it as easy as possible to recruit, hire, and retain the best candidates possible out there. For us with the restaurant industry, we're all after the same candidate, I guess, if you will, and so it's about being nimble and trying to get to the best ones first and then of course attracting them and then retaining them and keeping them inside of the four walls. That leads to development and promotion and forward growth. And so people is our number one challenge. Sometimes it's great challenge, sometimes it's hurtful challenge, sometimes it's growing challenge, but it all starts with making sure we have the right people in place.

Daniel Blaser (03:50):

Which of work Streams products are you currently using and what sort of functionality are you taking advantage of in the workstream platform?

Wendy Hull (03:59):

Absolutely. So it depends. So we're utilizing Workstream a little bit different for the brands. So on the Mad Greens and the Snappy Salad side, which are our salad inspired concepts, we have elected to use the QR code and the text portion of it. We do not use the onboarding site and that's not a work stream deficiency. It's a great platform, it's just our HRIS system already has an onboarding tool that is built in and baked into the module, and so to have two would be overkill. So essentially on that side, what we end up doing is we streamline the communication to the GM and allow them to have easier hiring, and then once the candidate is hired, we push them into our HRIS system to apply. Now in Tokyo, Joe's our Asian inspired, they have the onboarding side of it that will feed directly into a DP, and so they're utilizing the dashboard in a different way that we are and that works for them and they seem to get extreme benefit from that process as well, which is great. So we're kind of using workstream in a very watered down approach in one segment and then a little bit more robust in the next.

Daniel Blaser (05:21):

Why was it so important to your tech stack and your strategy that you're building out to have integration be able to integrate across different platforms like that? Why is that something that's important for your approach?

Wendy Hull (05:36):

Well, it's super important. It eliminates time, it eliminates administrative burdensome. When you can have a system that streamlines into your platform, it eliminates even just errors if you will, because it feeds over so systematically and so smooth and it takes a lot of that burden off of the individual. You don't have to upload files, you don't have to go through Excel spreadsheets. It's kind of getting out of this archaic time where you've got all these Excel spreadsheets just flying out there in the universe hoping they get grabbed onto. And so by having a tech stack where everybody talks to everybody, it just creates efficiency and accuracy and also it also has great support. If there's an issue that we run into, and not often with workstream, but in a DP, we've got a team where there are individuals that work on the integration part of it, and so they are able to jump in and help us very, very quickly. I'll be honest with you, the only reason why we did not do something similar for the other two brands is because we had an HRIS system that didn't play well with others, and so they didn't allow integration, and so we found ourselves oftentimes having to do the uploads and the downloads and it's night and day when you're, every Friday you have to do an upload versus just having the systems talk to each other, so it's just more efficient.

Daniel Blaser (07:16):

How were your company's hiring efforts specifically before Workstream falling short, or where were they lacking? Oh

Wendy Hull (07:26):

Gosh, I can't even want to go back to that time to be honest with you. I'm sure as many companies without workstream do it today, you have somebody that places an ad out there and on job boards, most notably over the past several years, the Indeeds, the career builders, the LinkedIns, whatever the job board may be, and you post the ad and you put a contact number in there and then you hope candidates call or email that. And then for our operators, we would post on let's say Indeed for a team member position and then we would put the stores the main point of contact and they'd get candidates that would call or email them. And by the time the GM actually stepped away from the line and had an opportunity to call this employee back or candidate and then schedule the interview, there could be a 4, 6, 8, sometimes 12 hour gap, and they've already lost the candidate. And so we've been with Workstream now, I want to say maybe three, almost four years, and it's been a game changer of having instant candidates go through the setting up of an interview right away. Prior to that, it was kind of you just post an ad out there and you hope people apply and you hope you get back to 'em in time that they're still unemployed and oftentimes that may not be the case.

Daniel Blaser (08:53):

I had love to hear a little bit from your perspective about how you think Workstream helps improve the applicant experience and then how that connects maybe to improved employee engagement and retention down the line by having a better applicant experience.

Wendy Hull (09:09):

I think it improves the applicant experience because it's responsive. A lot of the applicants that we interview right now, they are in an age of technology and social media that if they don't get a certain response in a certain amount of time, they either get disengaged or they get angry or it plays into even sometimes mental wellness. So the applicant experience a, it's responsive, they can engage over their smartphones, they're not doing it on a pc, which if you ask any 18 to 21-year-old these days, what is even a PC at this point? Oh, you mean that thing in my mom's office? And so they have information at real time in their hands and so they feel valued, they feel wanted, it's, oh, I just scanned this to apply and all of a sudden immediately I get a text to fill out all of these things and you can tailor the applicant experience. Employers can culturally to sound human, which is great. And so oftentimes they may not know they're speaking to an AI or whatever the system usage is. It could be customized to really speak to your language internally. And so the applicant experience is that it's not that I submit something and I'm forgotten about, it's okay, they really need me, they want me, I feel valued and it's on my phone and my brain is wired to respond right away. Oh look, they're responding back. And so I think it calls for high engagement.

Daniel Blaser (10:46):

How do you think workstream has impacted things like your average time to fill or your applicant response time? Some people will actually know the numbers behind that, if not, you can just kind of speak to it in a general sense.

Wendy Hull (10:59):

Time to fill I think has gotten shorter for us because we have obviously the applicant gets in front of us much quicker and so we can literally have an interview scheduled the same day, and so time to fill our jobs have become less. As far as what we're posting out there, my budget has actually decreased quite a bit because I'm not just throwing blind ads out there. We're actually staffing our restaurants. The great news is, I want to say right now today, knock on wood, we're probably 90% staffed out of most of our units. Now, a lot of that doesn't necessarily only have to do with getting the applicants in front of our GMs in a timely manner, but it also has to do with our retention and our development and our values and our culture. But really what we found is your first contact with the applicant sets the stage for how they expect the rest of the experience to go to at least get 'em to the 90 day mark where you know might have some sticky paper there. And so I don't have quantifiable data or facts on our time to fill metrics, but I can tell you I'm sitting here today in a much better place staffing wise than I was prior to workstream. In fact, again, like I said, we're in a very solid staffing spot.

Daniel Blaser (12:31):

You mentioned that one of your number one jobs is to support operators in helping them streamline their hiring and whatnot. So if you were to think, and you said you've been with Workstream for a few years, so this might be hard to remember, but I was going to ask a before and after as far as how much time you're having to spend supporting on these tasks and being that support person in a way versus how much time Workstream has saved you, and then maybe approximately how much time Workstream has saved the operators, the general managers, just kind of thinking in those terms.

Wendy Hull (13:11):

Yeah, no, a ton of time, a ton of time. I think that's where work Streams provided a good portion of the benefit of value. So pre-work stream, if I needed to post an ad, the steps that I had to take to go do that, I look back on it and when you're in the moment, you don't realize how cumbersome it is, but then when you have something so streamlined, you look back and you're like, wow, that was a lot. You have to go in, you have to create or post the job description, tailor it. It'd probably take me, I dunno, 10 minutes per every job posting and back then I probably did about four or five a week and then I'd at some points even have to move them around to different locations due to applicant flow not being robust enough. With Workstream today, my personal time is I just literally, it takes me about 30 seconds to go in and click a button because everything's pre-designed templates.

(14:11):

It's just really super easy to use as far as supporting our operators, the time that they have back to support their team and focus on the guest in hospitality. They've gotten quite a bit of it back. Instead of being in the back office hunting and pecking all of these applicants and they can go search online and doing all of these things just to turn on and see their dashboard, that they've got a couple interviews coming in even that afternoon that they actually haven't really even spent a lot of time setting up because the system does it all for them. They've gotten hours back throughout the week of them being able to focus on the business and the guests and the team members and the food and the quality. It's getting them back to the frontline instead of tracking and chasing down candidates that may or may not show up or who knows. So it's been great.

Daniel Blaser (15:11):

You kind of mentioned a second ago how all Quick service restaurants are sort of competing for the same talent. How do you think that workstream gives your company an advantage over the other businesses? You're all trying to maybe hire the same pool of workers, trying to find the best ones that are going to stick around work hard, good customer service. How does it give you an advantage because you use workstream?

Wendy Hull (15:36):

Well, for companies that don't use workstream, they should, because I already have that advantage. I mean, it's just technology. It's engaging with applicants out there that are born in the tech world. And so workstream gives us the advantage. We get to the applicant faster, we schedule them faster, we are able to, which I really like, we can set up our own pre-screen questions and so we can drill down into the workforce exactly what we want when we want and we can tailor those per positions. So what a team member for us is qualified to do and needs to be qualified, whether it be age or experience all the way up into a general manager are so vastly different. And so you can really tailor work stream and what you're looking for and get rid of all of the noise that you're not, where if you have a competitor that doesn't have work stream, they're digging through that noise because they're not able to be nimble and actually scale it down to what they specifically need. And so just the time it would take alone is also a game changer that we just don't have that noise because we're using the system so efficiently.

Daniel Blaser (16:52):

You mentioned a second ago, if you're not using workstream, then you should, what other advice would you give? Maybe someone's listening to this conversation down the road and thinking, oh man, I've been meaning to try that out. I need to be more automated, that kind of thing. What other advice would you give somebody that's in similar shoes as yours looking maybe as considering work stream?

Wendy Hull (17:15):

You're in the restaurant business and you watch it evolve, and I've been doing this for 20 plus years and I remember if anybody's listening that remembers this, doing employment files in paper form and having manila folders in a file cabinet all the way to where we are today and it's all cloud-based and we've got social media and just such fast data points that we can analyze almost everything. And you know what? We're not even where we're going to be in 10 years. We're going to be so much farther advanced. And so for somebody out there that's like, man, I've been looking at this and probably not just looking at workstream, but my advice would be looking at all your tech stack and finding ways to connect with the candidates and the applicants and even your employees once you get them in a way that speaks their language in today's generation and build a culture over what matters to who you're trying to recruit.

(18:18):

For us in the restaurant business, a lot of it is technology. A lot of it is when we roll out a new system, it's how can they get it on their mobile? How can we communicate them with them in real time? How can we celebrate them and make them feel valued knowing it's only going to be on a device that they can fit in their pocket? How can they read their paycheck stubs easily? How do they get ahold of people that they need at one click of the button? It's all about having this access to what you want and what you need quickly. And so I think Workstream does provide that, but if you're somebody that's truly looking to round out their approach to staff and you're a little bit deficient or behind in some of the technology pieces out there, start to dig in and really, really, really take a look at ways to grow your business from that aspect to be able to reach more people more efficiently.

Daniel Blaser (19:20):

What would you say is an oftentimes overlooked or misunderstood, but really important thing to remember when it comes to attracting and retaining hourly workers?

Wendy Hull (19:34):

That's a great question. There's so many things that you can do that's oftentimes, I mean the big one for me is walk the walk. You have an employee come in that may not know who you are or just see you as a salad shop or an Asian shop and maybe they think you look pretty cool from the outside. And then they have an engagement piece that they're like, okay, this is really great. And they have all of these great experiences until the day they start and then it goes to hell. And then all of a sudden they're like, this is not what I thought I was coming into. Understand your employment branding, understand your marketing, understand your culture, understand your leadership team, understand who your developers are and where your slow points are. And just understand that you're going to have really great leaders and you're going to have leaders that might be causing your turnover.

(20:32):

Like know your slow points, walk the walk if you want to emulate the brand you're trying to position yourself to be, make sure the entire employment experience starts from step one. And if that is in the applicant side, the recruiting side, the job description on how that's set up to even get them to the applicant, be consistent and make sure that you may not be overlooking anything, but make sure that your leaders that are hiring, attracting, retaining, and developing and growing your business aren't overlooking it either one bad day is fine, but to have somebody have a ton of bad days in a row and just lose sight of what's important is overlooking what you're trying to do. And so a long way of answering it, it's, it's a lot, but just walk your walk.

Daniel Blaser (21:31):

Thank you so much 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 Wendy on LinkedIn. Until next time, we're clocking out.