PICKUP: Increased visibility into pipeline and improved workflow to reduce costs
About
PICKUP specializes in “friction-free” same day and scheduled delivery of big, heavy, and high value items. They deliver furniture, mattresses, HVAC equipment, and more directly to customers’ homes by partnering with leading retailers and commercial businesses. The delivery team, known as PICKUP Good Guys, is composed of trusted, fully vetted military veterans, first responders and all-around good guys. PICKUP Good Guys consistently provide exceptional customer experiences in over 75 service areas nationwide.
Challenges in the application process
PICKUP strives to get the most effective people on the road at the lowest cost possible. To help sort through applications and find the most qualified candidates, they needed a single platform with automated functions and a comprehensive view of candidates. This broad visibility also helps move quality candidates through the process as quickly as possible and avert one of their biggest onboarding roadblocks: applicant drop-off.
PICKUP noticed applicants dropping off at different stages of the application process. For example, when applicants were asked to upload an image of their vehicle, they would abandon the page and immediately leave after they had undergone a background check. The increase in drop-off rates was getting expensive for PICKUP as they poured resources into vetting applicants who didn’t complete the onboarding process.
Madi Emsoff, Good Guy Experience Lead at PICKUP, also had a broader vision beyond just onboarding at high volumes. She also wanted to find the best quality candidates and increase their application completion rates. She believed this would “change the drop-off points, getting the most effective people on the road, and not cost as much money to do it.”
With Fountain in place, PICKUP leveraged the platform’s capabilities to better manage applicants, prevent applicant drop-off, and ultimately get better drivers on the road faster.
“We feel like a global company but are operating with a small recruitment team.”
Increased visibility improves team communication
Accustomed to receiving an influx of applications, PICKUP turned to Fountain’s Universal Applicant View to filter applicants quickly and get a better idea of where they were in the onboarding process.
“We get anywhere from 50 to 100 applicants every single day, but I’m onboarding at least 12 cities or more at any given time,” said Emsoff. “I need to be able to filter by city and look at those applicants quickly and efficiently, so the Universal Applicant View has been really great.”
Emsoff and her recruiting team also took advantage of Fountain’s tagging feature to keep track of which team member is doing what activity.
“We have so many people looking at the same stuff daily,” she said. “The Multi-user Presence Indicator shows which user is on which profile, which is super great for our team,” she said.
Rearranging workflows to reduce drop-off
In an unconventional approach, PICKUP rearranged a few of the application stages to prevent unqualified or unreliable applicants from getting too far in the process. Rather than weed out applicants using automated processes and knockout questions upfront, they moved some of the more manual stages from the end to the beginning of the application process. This required more work from applicants resulting in higher quality candidates who are more likely to commit to the team.
“Before, we used to have all applicants consent to the background check, but we were having so many people not work after we paid for their background check,” said Emsoff. “So we added a pre-orientation stage to test [applicants’] engagement.”
When applicants do drop off, PICKUP triggers Fountain’s automated text messages to remind them about their application, and PICKUP can target these messages to specific metro areas across the United States.
“We’re able to actually hit our different time zones we want,” Emsoff said. “The scheduling message feature works well for that, not only to get around message delays, but also to hit whatever area we want at whatever time. We feel like a global company but are operating with a small recruitment team.”
"We feel like a global company but are operating with a small recruitment team.”
Onboarding the right people
Moving manual steps of the process to the beginning of the application has opened the door for PICKUP to make similar changes elsewhere in the application funnel.
“It’s been eye-opening about how we have set up our workflows,” Emsoff said. “We actually are talking about changing other parts of our process.”
One of these changes has been to ask applicants to submit basic identifying information and complete a pre-orientation before diving into personal details, like tax IDs, vehicle information, or signing a service provider agreement. This reorganization helped PICKUP save on costs of document signing and background checks for applicants who weren’t serious about working.
“We saw an immediate change of thousands of dollars in just a couple of months’ time,” Emsoff said. “It also helps keep engagement up.”
A fast and CRM-savvy ATS
Whether applicants drop off due to disinterest, resignation, or because they weren’t accepted on the team, PICKUP holds onto applicants’ information so they can reach out again when another opportunity comes along. In this way, Fountain acts as a candidate relationship management (CRM) tool, enabling PICKUP to manage their applicant pool and match the right candidates to the right opportunities.
“We are able to most effectively use Fountain to contact all of our active team members,” Emsoff said. “So we have found that as well as applicant tracking, we’re able to use [Fountain] after they’re already active.”
Removing time-constrictive barriers and weeding out candidates who are unlikely to finish have saved PICKUP loads of time and have delivered more qualified candidates faster.
“Time is super important, and a lot of our decisions are made based on how long it takes the applicant to get through the process,” Emsoff said. “More friction points for somebody applying for an opportunity means fewer people are going to make it to the end.”
“Being able to change the type of information the applicant is providing and change the time of the process, I believe, is going to bring us better quality people.”
