Foodles carries out 1 recruitment every 5 employee referrals

1 recruitment every 5 employee referrals : how trusty transformed Foodles' recruitment strategy

Aurore Baudry, Director of Recruitment, Employer Brand and Internal Communications at Foodles, talks in this article about the transformation of Foodles' employee referral program with trusty, and in particular about its incredible conversion rate for co-opted profiles: 22%.

The challenges faced by Foodles before Trusty

When Aurore took up her post at Foodles, employee referral was not well established within the company. Given a great deal of freedom by her management to implement actions, Aurore took the gamble of investing very early on in this lever to relaunch employee referral :

"Our employee referral policy was not known to anyone, and employees lacked visibility of open positions, didn't know they could co-opt, and for some didn't even have the means to do so. What's special about Foodles is that we have both head office and operational populations in the field: and it's precisely our operational populations, i.e. our order pickers and delivery drivers for example, didn't even have access to our IT tools, and so couldn't co-opt. On the admin side, it was a real complexity, with follow-up on Excel, sometimes by e-mail: it wasn't efficient and super difficult to pass on the information, in both directions: on the one hand informing the recruiters that there had been a employee referral, and on the other keeping the employee up to date with the evolution of the profile in the recruitment process."

The impact of Trusty deployment

In this context, the introduction of trusty has simplified access to information, which was Foodles' number 1 challenge:

"Trusty has enabled us to make our employee referral policy known to everyone, automate the entire animation process, and centralize all information. It was the missing brick to create a real culture of commitment and collaboration within Foodles on this recruitment part.

For employees, Trusty is simply accessible in their daily communication tool: Slack. We have created a channel dedicated to employee referral on Slack, which automatically animates our entire program, transparently for all employees: announcing job openings, recruitments, best referrers, etc.

At the same time, the integration of Trusty with our Teamtailor ATS automates all actions for the recruitment team: co-opted profiles are instantly created in our ATS, and tracked throughout the recruitment process, giving us a much finer view of our employee referral policy."

The deployment of Trusty has demonstrated the strong commitment of Foodles' employees to the company's mission, and a real endorsement of its employer brand.

"When we launched trusty, we knew we'd have committed people, but it was hard to know exactly what it would achieve. Personally, it's a lever I've believed in for a very long time, but today it's great to be able to contemplate the results 2 years later, because the reality is that we have:

- a huge number of employee referrals at Foodles, which illustrates that people feel good at our company. For me, this is a great KPI to track;

- 1 recruitment closed every 5 employee referrals, which is just enormous and 12 times more efficient than my other recruitment channels;

- a recruitment cost well below all my other levers;

- a real culture of employee referral and employee advocacy, which we didn't have before. Our employees have become our best ambassadors, co-opting and sharing their employee referral links with our offers on their own, without any need for communication. They've taken the reflex, and it's become automatic for our teams today, to get involved in our recruitment efforts;

- greater involvement of people recruited by employee referral, right from their onboarding;

- better retention of these profiles, who stay with us longer than others, even in the most difficult and high-tension positions where turnover can occur;

- a much better time-to-fill, because someone who is co-opted and who has a perfect fit with the requirement thanks to the filter of our employees, we'll be able to recruit them twice as fast.

When I look at these results, I'm very proud of what we've built. All companies should invest in employee referral and take this gamble. Objectively speaking, I don't see much disinterest".

Trusty's expert eye:
Setting up a employee referral program can take time. And Aurore's success at Foodles has been precisely because she was able to make employee referral a priority right from the start, and to invest efforts in creating a employee referral culture. 2 years later, the results are clear: her efforts have paid off, with employee referral representing an essential pillar of her talent recruitment and retention strategy, and a valuable return on investment thanks in particular to her exceptional 22% conversion rate.

Trusty: simplicity for employees

One of Foodles' main challenges in launching Trusty was to offer a solution that worked for all the company's populations.

"My recruitment challenges cover a range of extremely different professions: we recruit profiles at head office for Tech jobs, like any startup or scaleup on the market, but also food and logistics profiles, for jobs that are much more field-oriented. We needed a solution that could support all our employees, and enable them to act as our intermediary with their networks. This is where trusty's MagicLinks were essential, as they enabled all Foodles employees, even those who didn't have an email address and couldn't access Slack for example, to take part in our program."

A case in point that particularly appealed to Foodles:

"The operational populations are major contributors to this employee referral lever. These are the populations on which we obviously have the highest turnover, both because they have the lowest salaries, but also because conditions are not easy: nevertheless, they are the heart of the reactor, and we would be nothing without these people. And the surprise, which we hadn't necessarily anticipated, is that we simply realized by analyzing the data that our field populations were our best referrers. It's far from anecdotal, because we don't talk about it much, but catering staff or maintenance technicians, these are sectors that are in short supply, just as much as tech."

Trusty's expert eye
Trusty's approach has always been to offer the simplest employee referral solution on the market. At the heart of this simplicity are the Trusty applications integrated directly into Slack and Microsoft Teams, enabling employees to use the solution without having to leave their work environment. But one of Trusty's key features is undeniably the MagicLink, a personal and unique link from employee referral, enabling any employee to share, via a single link, all open positions within their company with everyone in their network. MagicLink then enables anyone to ask the employee to be co-opted within the company. A high-performance, universal and extremely easy-to-use lever for all populations, even those in the field who only have their smartphone at hand.

Trusty: performance for recruiters

"With Trusty, the whole recruitment team has the same visibility on all information at the same time. The fact that trusty is integrated with our ATS, for example, greatly simplifies the management of our program: all our jobs are automatically synchronized from Teamtailor on Trusty, every day and without any action on our part; all co-opted candidates are created instantly on the right offer, and tracked throughout the process to notify our staff of the progress of each of their employee referrals in our recruitment process; we've even created a slack channel reserved for our recruitment team, which allows us to be notified in real time of each new employee referral so we can process it as quickly as possible."

Trusty's expert eye
Behind every successful employee referral program, you'll find a committed, proactive recruitment team, able to steer its program to optimize it over the long term. Trusty is committed to simplifying the employee referral experience for employees, but the key to its success also lies in its ability to support recruitment teams in animating and managing their employee referral program, to simplify action-taking by recruitment teams.
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"At Foodles, data is at the heart of our business, including recruitment: I make all my decisions using data. If I put effort into a lever like employee referral, it's because I know I can get a better conversion rate than with my other channels: in this case, I can be sure of getting more qualified applications right from the start, with profiles that have a cultural fit already validated by my teams. When I see a 22% conversion rate, it's obviously something I like to prioritize. Trusty just makes my life easier on this lever: I don't need to search right and left, everything is centralized on my platform, I just need to choose the dates I'm interested in to get all the data I need.

We mustn't overlook the importance of data: not everything can be done in a day, it's the repetition of communications, of the challenges we've also launched with Trusty, that have enabled us to achieve the results we have today. And being able to measure each action to optimize our program has been a key point in our success. That and the fact of being able to act fast: and your campaign automation functionality for that is a big gas pedal, which is hyper powerful."

Trusty's expert eye:
In addition to enabling faster action, and saving recruitment teams time on a daily basis, Trusty also offers recruiters a better understanding of their employee referral program thanks to the extremely detailed analysis of the data available on the platform: considerable added value for companies, which generally have no visibility over the performance of their employee referral policy. For a company like Foodles, this has been a key factor in optimizing their program over the past two years.

Foodles' employee referral policy

"Our employee referral policy is open to all our employees: interns, work-study students, people on permanent or fixed-term contracts; everyone can contribute.We have set up 3 types of bonus, which are paid out once the co-opted employee's trial period has been validated:

- €1,000 for Tech staff;

- €500 for head office or managerial staff;

- €200 for field staff, i.e. our catering staff and operators (order pickers or delivery drivers)

We have also set up a system of quarterly challenges with trusty, which we manage super-simply using the tool's Campaigns function. Our model is simple: each employee referral earns points, and the further along in the recruitment process the profile I've co-opted is, the more points it earns me. At the end of the quarter, our 3 employees with the most points win a gourmet lunch or dinner for 2. Obviously, it was important for us to give priority to an experience in the world of food. In terms of budget, we're talking about €500 per quarter, divided between the winners."

Trusty's expert eye
Despite very reasonable premiums compared to the market at employee referral , the success of Foodles' employee referral policy has been overwhelming. It rewards a genuine commitment by Aurore, who has made it a priority at Foodles. Particularly noteworthy is the team's performance in engaging field staff, a sector under severe pressure, with the only incentive being a €200 bonus. This is the sign of a strong culture of collaboration, and of a fine employer brand supported by the commitment of employees both internally and in their external communications. One point that deserves to be challenged in the future: the payment of the employee referral bonus on validation of the trial period. We'll have to see whether this precaution is justified, by analyzing how many co-optees actually fail to validate their probationary period. If the ratio is low, Foodles will have every interest in rewarding employees who have made recruitment possible by employee referral as soon as the new employee joins the company. This often has many positive side-effects, further increasing the commitment of employees, who perceive the bonus as quicker and easier to obtain.

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