Case Study
About James Delivery
Industry: Retail, Technology
Company Size: 501-1000 employees
Department using Pipefy: Human Resources
Processes in Pipefy: Recruiting, Employee Onboarding
Tech stack: Route 53, Gmail, Outlook, Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365, Amazon AWS, YouTube, Mobile Friendly, Linkedin Marketing Solutions, Google Tag Manager, WordPress.org, SOASTA
When the COVID-19 pandemic brought in-person shopping to a halt, James Delivery faced a critical challenge: to scale their recruiting and onboarding processes virtually overnight to meet an unprecedented surge in demand for their now essential delivery services.
The company operates in a franchise format, with each independently owned and operated franchise territory contributing to the overall success of the international organization.
Challenge
Like much of the world, it was business as usual for employees at James Delivery, a small but growing grocery and market delivery service, when COVID-19 emerged in January 2020. As the virus spread and became a full-blown global pandemic in March, the subsequent lockdowns across the world proved successful in slowing the spread but affected thousands of businesses, many of which were forced to close their doors.
A previously unheard-of demand for food and grocery deliveries erupted as people looked for ways to prepare meals and stock their pantries without leaving home. For James Delivery, the pandemic offered an opportunity, but only if they could attract, hire, and onboard new employees quickly and efficiently.
Hiring and onboarding, at scale and with speed
James Delivery had to scale very quickly. In a time of mandated closings and new, unfamiliar business practices, this was an enviable problem, but a problem nonetheless. In an interview with Latin American Business Stories (LABS), founder Lucas Ceschin described the place the business found itself: “Changes to the business that would typically have taken 10 years happened in a matter of weeks.”
Management and employees suddenly found themselves severely understaffed and without standardized processes for recruiting, hiring, or onboarding new team members. Up to this point, all hiring had been carried out manually, and there was little to no communication between departments (Finance, HR, and IT, for example, all of whom had interrelated tasks to perform to process each new hire).
In response to its critical staff shortage, James Delivery began hiring 35 new employees per week. Human resources (HR) team leads quickly realized that their manual recruitment, hiring, and onboarding operations were not sustainable; there just weren’t enough hours in a day. Case in point: the first step in JD’s hiring process was to open a new position to be filled. That action should, in turn, have led to a requisition approval request from the finance team. There were no standardized means to accomplish either of those things, however.
James Delivery had been planning for expansion, and its tech stack reflected that anticipated growth. It included complex cloud systems such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Office 365, and Google Suite. But they also depended on a variety of apps including Route 53, Outlook, YouTube, Linkedin Marketing Solutions, Google Tag Manager, WordPress, and SOASTA.
The swell of applications and new hires immediately overwhelmed the IT team. With their bandwidth now consumed by support for the hiring and onboarding processes, James Delivery knew they needed a solution that would integrate seamlessly and implement quickly – all without adding new stress to the IT team.
James Delivery was already familiar with Pipefy, using it to manage some back-office processes when the pandemic-related demand surge began. Pleased with the results and aware of Pipefy’s flexibility, they wanted to see if its process management platform could solve this new challenge.
James Delivery defined their non-negotiables. They needed a solution that:
- Structured and standardized hiring and onboarding workflows
- Connected these workflows to the requisition approval workflow
- Integrated several departments into a single platform to maintain accurate, up-to-date records
- Automated the onboarding process to give HR teams more face time with new hires
- Made it easy for HR teams to modify and improve workflows without consuming additional IT resources for even incremental changes
- Met their IT team's requirements for security and integration
The James Delivery HR team now uses custom-built workflows. It employs Pipefy’s forms feature to collect all candidate information and send it to a single repository with restricted access. Relevant stakeholders can perform tasks related to the candidate’s path through the recruitment process without worries of compromised or incorrect data.
Once James Delivery implemented Pipefy for HR service delivery, all other Pipefy-managed departments in the organization were seamlessly integrated with HR and one another. IT, for example, could now quickly provide new hires with equipment and training, Finance could rotate them into payroll, and all stakeholders would gain visibility into the statuses of employment candidates, no matter what stage the recruitment was in.
James Delivery’s HR team automated several time-consuming recruitment tasks, as well, including those of manually filling out and issuing forms to candidates and new employees. This saved the team - and its ~35 new hires per week - considerable time and effort.
After only 2 months of Pipefy usage, James Delivery saw 134% ROI.
James Delivery had 100% positive feedback from candidates and new employees regarding their experiences with the newly-optimized recruitment and onboarding processes.
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