Max : Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And today on the show, I'm delighted to welcome Alison Kaizer who is head of talent at Lunchbox, and Lunchbox is a company that helps restaurants get better engagement and more sales. Alison will tell us about a little bit about that exciting startup or technology company. And we'll talk as well about the transition to remote hiring and how to reinforce how to establish strong connections remotely during the recruitment process and how to communicate employee culture in the recruitment process so that people are not walking into a company that feels strange and foreign and disconnected to them, which is the game that I guess most of the world is trying to figure out right now. So a hot topic. Alison, welcome to the show.

Alison: Thank you for having me.

Max: Thanks. Thanks for joining. So tell us a little bit about yourself to begin with. How did you end up in the beautiful world of recruitment?

Alison: It's a funny story, actually. I feel like no one decides that they want to go into recruitment, everyone falls into it. 

Max: It's an accident 

Alison: …by accident. But I have a background in business. I worked in management consulting for a little bit. I worked in advertising. And then I ran my own business for some time. And when I decided I wanted to go back into a more formalized kind of office environment, I sent my resume to a recruiter. And she basically said, I think you would be an awesome recruiter, based on your background, you have experience in the industry from multiple facets. So I went through an interview process with this agency, and it was fantastic and ended up deciding to kind of take the plunge. And I really haven't looked back for the last seven or eight years that I've been recruiting.

Max: And what she liked about your background is the fact that you were working in marketing. Correct? And I think I keep telling people that, you know, recruiting and sales, and actually recruiting is marketing because it's more and more about managing big digital media spend, and large funnels. And it's, you know, I think it's even more of a valuable skill right now to be able to buy media than it is to study psychology, which has been traditionally where a lot of recruiters come from.

Alison: Yes, definitely. And also really understanding the subject matter expertise that you're talking to candidates about adds so much value. You can be strategic, and you have a lot of empathy for their position as a candidate. So it's a great entry point if you're interested in becoming a recruiter to, you know, enter an era and a function that you know a lot about.

Max: Well, I'm glad that you're part of this industry. I also fell into it by accident. And well, let's say what about Lunchbox. What is Lunchbox? And why? What makes it an exciting challenge from a talent acquisition standpoint?

Alison: Yeah. So Lunchbox is a really incredible company to work for. It's incredibly disruptive in the restaurant space. And basically, the premise is allowing restaurants to compete with third-party platforms. So the door dashes and the Uber Eats of the world are charging significant fees to restaurants where they end up breaking even or losing money on their orders. And they also don't really have access to their data, in order to make strategic decisions that impact the business moving forward. And so what Lunchbox does is it facilitates that digital experience for restaurants completely holistically, but allows them to maintain all of the control as a first-party platform. So we help with web orders. We can do mobile. We help with loyalty programs. We even have an in-house studio that helps with all of the marketing that restaurants need to drive the customers directly to that first-party platform that we're facilitating. And then they also have access to all of their data, which is incredibly empowering. So it's almost like a Shopify, for restaurants. And from a talent acquisition perspective, I think the challenges are very similar to what so many other tech companies are dealing with, currently, especially at an early stage. It's so competitive from a talent standpoint, particularly around engineering, sales, and marketing. We're growing incredibly quickly as well. So just the sheer volume of our recruiting efforts. When I joined in early March, we were about 60 people and now we're about 250 people, we've hired almost one and a half people a day on average. And so building a scalable process where there's a lot of alignment and allowing us to be competitive, but also very measured in our evaluation of candidates is a significant challenge for any talent leader.

Max: Sounds incredibly expensive to be growing at that pace. In this from March 2021, onwards, when the cost of… Yeah, the cost of hiring has gone up, basically, across the board and in marketing in particular. So well, maybe could you share a word about what your marketing mix looks like from, you know, recommend marketing spend?

Alison: I'm sorry. I don't totally understand the question like, “What are…[overlap]

Max: Where would you spend most of your ad money? Is it the traditional channels like Indeed and LinkedIn, or are there other new ways to connect with people? I mean,  I don't want to spill the beans if you have a secret sauce you don't want to send to the competition. But just to get a feel for where you operate.

Alison: Now that I can definitely answer. So from a recruitment marketing perspective, I think we're really lucky because one thing Lunchbox does unbelievably well is branding and marketing. In general, if you take a look at our careers page, it's very advanced, the brand is excellent. The career page is extremely robust. There's a very clear tone of voice. And so we've invested a lot in our marketing in general, as well as our employer brand, which allows us to cut through a lot of the noise. And so we actually spend very little money on marketing from a traditional kind of sense. We do have some LinkedIn job slots that we leverage, and we use Greenhouse so it allows us to post all of our jobs on LinkedIn in general. But a lot of the traction that we get is just, you know, us all being very active on LinkedIn, and having very strong recruiter networks, making sure that we have really strong outreach. And that's really speaking to our employer brands and our culture. So a lot of our active outreach, gets positive response, and just focusing on having a great culture and brand. So when people hear about us, they're excited as opposed to using a lot of the more traditional marketing tactics.

Max: Alot of word of mouth and yeah, positive feelings that generate enough talent and enough applicants. I believe that-- obviously, it's working for you so I'm not gonna tell you it's a good strategy. If it's working, that's all you need to know. You don't need to hear it from me. But I do believe that when you get to a certain size, maybe like five, 600 people, you kind of hit the wall in terms of how much referral, with the share of hires that you can do through referrals at some point. Those, I think, numbers go down a little bit when you get to a bigger company. But…

Alison: Alot of our hires are candidates that we actively sourced. I mean,...