Krispy Kreme find hiring success with data-driven decision making

Krispy Kreme streamline their recruitment process for great results

Although headquartered in Sydney, Krispy Kreme Australia has 23 dedicated stores across the country. Our HR team is based and operates from the Sydney office, but the bulk of the recruitment for in-store roles is completed by store managers, at a local level. In the past, this has created some difficulty in ensuring consistency and efficiency in our recruitment process.

In a bid to introduce some structure and cohesion, we started working with Expr3ss! in 2012. The automated solution enables us to confidently and quickly identify the individuals that are not only qualified but are the right cultural fit for the Krispy Kreme brand, by establishing benchmarks against which all applicants can be measured. On occasions, we will see more than 250 people applying for one role – the ability to use an online, automated solution to review them, rather than wading through endless paperwork, has offered huge benefits.

Our relationship with Expr3ss! has gone from strength to strength and we were lucky enough to benefit from the organisation’s recent partnership with Xref. Combined, the two solutions of a like-minded approach to HR process improvement, and they bookend our recruitment with efficient, consistent, reliable and data-driven decision making solutions.

Business focused benefits

While we recognised that something had to be done to align recruitment across the country, it can be daunting to introduce a new way of doing things. However, the Expr3ss! solution has been rolled out across all our stores with ease. All store managers now use the platform to filter through applications and select the most appropriate staff to progress. As a result, we’re seeing more consistency in our hires, more engaged employees that are better suited to the company and, importantly, we have a much lower staff turnover.

Expr3ss! was an immediate success for us, and has become a critical component of the candidate selection process. After introducing Xref 6 months ago, we can already see the impact it is having in the final stages of an applicant’s journey.

Efficiency

Much like candidate selection, our reference checking process was previously led by store managers – however, given its impact on the final hiring decision, it was also supported by HR staff in the head office. The process was long, tedious, time consuming and inefficient, and there was huge desire for change.  

The introduction of Xref, has seen us completely restructure our approach to something that is a critical stage of the recruitment process but had become somewhat of a chore. We have been able to centralise our reference checking - store managers now send a contract request form and the head office team completes the reference check through Xref, prior to issuing a letter of offer. This ensures our head office team maintain visibility and control over the process while also offering store managers more capacity to be on the shop floor, which is undoubtedly the best use of their time.

But the consistency doesn’t stop at the way the process is conducted. Rather than relying on store managers making calls, using outdated checklists and collecting feedback in whatever way they had become accustomed to, Xref allows us to ensure we are asking the same questions of every referee for a role. The questions, which we can also tailor to each individual role, ensure that we are able to generate comparable data, which generates insights that are a genuine contributor to the final hiring decision.

Value-add

We have also found that, while Xref offers the perfect last step in the recruitment of store staff, the flexibility of the process allows it to be used in slightly different ways to suit our hiring needs. If we are only looking for one person at a time – which is often the case in head office – we can use Xref to reference check the whole shortlist and consult the resulting reports in the final decision making process. Rather than just validating a hiring decision, Xref can also inform it.

It is fantastic to see two solutions like this integrate to offer organisations like us the opportunity to streamline more of our business processes. We have been impressed by the service they each individually provide, as well as the ease with which we can use Xref from the existing Expr3ss! platform that our team is familiar with. The efficiency, assurance and value these like-minded solutions offer has been integral in the improvements we’ve seen in our recruiting processes and we’re excited to see where HR automation might go next.