How recruitment software helps retail and hospitality recruiters manage high volume applications

Retail and hospitality recruiters are no strangers to high volume recruitment. 

Since 2014 we’ve helped Tesco process more than 2.6 million applications annually, for instance. And during the pandemic, we saw a 3,900% increase in applications in two days across our retail and hospitality customers.

If you weren’t a recruiter, you might intuitively think loads of applications would be a good thing. Especially since 99% of retail talent leaders in the UK are concerned about talent shortages.

But in fact, the opposite is true. High volume can snarl up your process, increase time-to-hire, damage your employer brand, and ultimately make it harder to hire great people. 

Tribepad has been built to help retail and hospitality recruitment teams overcome their biggest recruitment challenges – and high volume can certainly be one of those.

Here’s how our talent acquisition software can help build a faster, more cost-effective process your candidates love. 

How Tribepad’s recruitment software helps retail and hospitality recruitment teams do more with less

1 – An awesome candidate database

At the heart of Tribepad is a super powerful candidate database your recruiters will genuinely enjoy using (and we know that’s saying something). 

When you’re handling high volumes of applications, your database can turn into a sprawling mess that’s near-impossible to search. Plus its common in retail and hospitality for recruitment to be decentralised, so you might be using tens of different systems, spreadsheets or personal preference processes. 

If candidates don’t even make it into your database, you can’t track them, report on them or maintain a relationship with them. And there’s no frustration quite like the frustration of paying an agency for someone you already had in your database but couldn’t find. 

Some of the stuff that makes our database great:

• Tags and talent pools

Tags are customisable labels you can add to applicants when they enter your database, so you can easily find candidates and nurture relationships. For example, you could create a talent pool of #London #StoreManagers with a #MarketingDegree.

More proactive, less firefighting.  

• Candidate suggestion engine

You probably have hundreds of thousands of applicants on your database: finding the most relevant can be a nightmare. Our intelligent candidate suggestion engine suggests best-fit candidates based on your criteria, in seconds. Keep track of the people you worked so hard to build a relationship with to start with!

• Multi-brandable ATS on a unified database

Tribepad supports multi-branding but with one central database, so you can support different brands with their own processes, jobs, branding, EVP and so on, while leveraging the benefit of being big.

It’s a force-multiplier because it means every recruiter benefits from every other recruiter’s work. 

For instance, say your recruiters for one restaurant brand are hiring for waiting staff. They might get 2000 applications, long-list 100, interview 50, second interview 20, and hire 5. Imagine if your other restaurant brand could swoop straight in and chat to the candidates you loved but who didn’t quite make the cut. It’s an instant shortlist, at your fingertips. 

• Simple migration

However great new talent acquisition tech might be, we know there’s never time for a data migration headache. Especially if your team’s already flat-out. 

We make switching to Tribepad easy, with a proven process for simple, smooth data migration. Less time collating and cleaning data; more time cooking on gas.  

2 – Streamlined recruitment process

As retail and hospitality recruiters know all too well, lots of recruitment tasks are repetitive, formulaic and manual. That’s not only deadly dull, it means you’re not efficient: crucial when you’re dealing with high application volumes. 

Tribepad is designed to codify and automate the stuff that can be codified and automated, so your recruiters can get more done in less time.

• Interview and Candidate Workflows 

Tribepad can configure Interview and Candidate Workflows for as many different roles as you need, across multiple brands. 

So you could define a three-stage application journey for customer service assistants but five-stage for a hotel manager. Or set different interview processes for different hotel brands within your umbrella. 

Then when you create a role, this consistent application and interview process is automatically defined: no manual input, no time wasted. 

• Automated Comms

There are hundreds of times recruiters need to message candidates, colleagues, or managers. Like sending sensitive rejection emails or interview requests. Or asking hiring managers to review a shortlist. 

With Tribepad, you can automate all these moments so nothing falls through the cracks. Our ATS & CRM comes with about 250 email templates to customise, so you don’t even need to write them from scratch. 

That’s a win for speed, a win for consistency, a win for team collaboration, and a win for the candidate experience. (And candidate experience, employee experience, and customer experience are intimately connected). 

• Automated onboarding

Tribepad Onboarding creates a totally seamless, consistent, and automated applicant-to-employee journey that preps new hires to thrive. 

• Easy onboarding workflow builder with unlimited templates
• E-contract management with simple contract builder, templates, bulk editing
• Self-service candidate onboarding portal 
• Recruiter, manager, and candidate action dashboard and task reminders

An easy way for retail and hospitality recruiters to create best-practice onboarding workflows. So all your hard work pays off with a productive, long-term hire.  

• Great reporting

Tribepad has more than 60 standardised reports and unlimited customisation options. This robust reporting functionality gives comprehensive visibility over your end-to-end recruitment process. So you can spot sticking points and unstick them. Knowledge is power, after all. 

Like… you could see time-to-hire is 32% lower for one hotel than your average and investigate further. Maybe then you discover there’s a different perks package including free use of the on-site gym, so you roll this out across your other hotels. 

Poor data visibility is a common problem for retail and hospitality brands, who often have complex, unwieldy recruitment processes. Better recruitment reporting makes quick-win improvements simple. 

• User Types and Hierarchy 

User Types mean you can set permissions for different people who use Tribepad, like resourcers, recruiters and team leaders. It’s how you keep control over the big unwieldy landscape you’re probably dealing with. 

Then Hierarchy’s a popular add-on that defines who can see what, based on your org chart. So you could define that regional teams only see recruitment for restaurants they recruit for, while the North-East manager can see all North-Eastern restaurants and your function head can see everything, as an example, 

So you keep control over your recruitment function, and recruiters don’t waste time with info that’s not relevant to them. 

3 – Speedy job creation

When you’re dealing with thousands of applications, writing and posting jobs can waste hours. You need to get onto the market and recruiting as fast as possible, but without inconsistency and without mistakes. 

Here’s a few ways Tribepad helps:

• Job templates and job cloning

All our retail and hospitality customers love templates, because it’s super common to recruit for the same roles constantly. Define jobs upfront, then create jobs with a click. It’s a huge time-saver. 

• Flexible location jobs 

Another big hit. Say you’re recruiting for retail sales assistants in 2000 stores across the UK. With Tribepad, you can set the location to ‘flexible’, so you can recruit for all those locations without needing to separately create, populate or post multiple jobs.

It saves a heap of time, and also money because you don’t need to use extra advertising slots with your boards. A double whammy we know you’re here for.

• Flexible job authorisation process

Like most retail and hospitality recruitment teams, you’re probably dealing with a heap of complexity. Our flexible job authorisation process helps you get your arms around this in a consistent way, so you can keep control effortlessly over your recruitment function.

Want all your recruiters to get three levels of authorisation before posting a job? Done. Want some of your recruiters to get one level of authorisation and trust others to act without authorisation at all? Done. 

• Integrations to job boards

Jobs you create in Tribepad can automatically populate to the world’s biggest search engine (Google for Jobs), the world’s biggest social media network (Facebook Job Search) and the biggest job board (Indeed), thanks to our comprehensive integrations. 

And we integrate with third party aggregators like Vacancy Poster and Broadbean so you can post to multiple job boards in moments. (And you have heaps of control over this, so different recruiters can only post to certain boards, and so on).  

• Bulk actions

It’s the little things that make the biggest difference. When you can’t take actions in bulk – like rejecting, shortlisting or inviting candidates to interview – recruitment takes ages longer than necessary. Plus, candidates often fall through the cracks. 

The result? Hundreds of hours wasted doing something you should’ve been able to with a click. And hundreds of candidates stuck in limbo, still “in process” for a role you already closed. Bulk actions put an end to that. 

4 – Automated pre-screening processes

When you’re dealing with huge application volumes, screening and shortlisting candidates can be a nightmare. Especially if you also struggle with quality of applications, which is a pretty common issue for retail and hospitality. Especially for the highest-volume entry-level roles. 

Tribepad accelerates this process in lots of ways:

• Killer questions 

These are yes/no questions that instantly rule out applicants who don’t tick the non-negotiable boxes. They can be whatever you like but it’s usually stuff like ‘Do you have Right to Work in the UK?’. 

The idea is, it stops candidates wasting time on pointless applications (basic respect!) and recruiters don’t waste time reviewing them. It’s better for everyone.  

• Pre-screening questionnaires

When you don’t want to be quite as clear-cut as killer questions, you can create pre-screening questionnaires to dig into whatever you want. These are super flexible around your needs and criteria – then the platform automatically scores and ranks applicants. So you can tackle your best-fit applicants faster.

• Automatic shortlisting and rejection

As well as scoring and ranking, Tribepad can also automatically shortlisting or rejecting candidates based on the scores you choose. So you focus where it matters, faster. 

• Automated background, criminal record and financial checks

We integrate with third-party checking companies, so you can add checks into any stage of your process as an automated step. Or send a check manually. Whatever suits, to cut delays. Tick the right boxes so you can get your new hires started sooner.

5 – Better candidate and recruiter interview experience

High volume recruiters can spend endless hours chasing candidates for interviews, scheduling and rescheduling (and re-rescheduling) and asking the same questions again and again. It’s not fun and it’s certainly not efficient. 

Plus, tired frustrated recruiters aren’t likely to give the best impression of your business so it has a knock-on impact for the candidate experience. 

Here’s how Tribepad makes interviews a whole lot easier. 

• Video Interviewing 

Your interview process can take up to 90% less time with Tribepad Video Interviewing. Candidates love it, because it’s miles more convenient. Recruiters love it because you can see heaps more people in way less time. It’s a no brainer for retail and hospitality recruitment.

Plus, in retail and hospitality you’re often recruiting for customer-facing roles so getting a sense of candidates face-to-face is super important. But unsustainable, if your only way of doing that is onsite interviews. 

And right now, when diversity’s rightfully the word on everyone’s lips, video interviewing introduces consistency that makes bias less likely. What’s not to like?

• Self-booked interview slots 

Empowering candidates to book themselves straight into your diary makes a heap of sense, because it totally removes scheduling back and forth. And it’s a much better experience for candidates too.

You can define group slots too, which makes scheduling assessment days easy. 

6 – Better manager collaboration

Retail and hospitality recruitment teams often operate through a decentralised model that sees hundreds or thousands (or tens of thousands) or busy managers trying to juggle recruitment while navigating their day job. 

You know what’s not great for the smooth running of your hotel? A hotel manager who’s not able to put enough time into managing the team or speaking with customers, because they’re stuck on recruitment admin.

Tribepad makes it super simple for hiring managers on-the-ground to collaborate as much as they need to, with nothing they don’t.

• Secure mobile access

Often, your hiring managers don’t have the luxury of sitting down at a desk whenever they need to handle recruitment. And if you wait for them to get the chance, you’ll be waiting a long time.

Tribepad is designed to be completely mobile, so your managers can get stuck in wherever they are.

• Candidate and interview summaries 

One major principle behind Tribepad is to drill everything down into its simplest component but allow you to get microscopic whenever you want to. 

For example, recruiters might want to watch interviews back, score them, add feedback, collaborate, sift and sort – but your managers might only need to see an overview of candidate CVs plus summarised feedback and scores. 

For recruiters in the retail and hospitality industry, it’s mission-critical to trim the fat from your processes to reliably bring better people into the business. While also protecting your employer brand by delighting your candidates. That’s what Tribepad’s all about. 

Tribepad is the trusted tech ally to smart(er) recruiters everywhere, designed to help you fall back in love with recruiting. Trusted by retail and hospitality businesses like Pizza Hut, KFC, Subway, Tesco, Superdry, Compass Group, Sodexo, Carpetright, Sofology, and Card Factory, 25 million people in 16 languages use Tribepad.