Chewse is a thriving, diverse, and culture-first startup – a company unabashedly about “Love & Excellence,” and dedicated to addressing every office’s catering needs. Chewse curates family-style meals for office teams, sourced from local restaurants in several markets around the U.S. It’s not just about serving delicious meals, Chewse is on a mission to bring customers together authentically through food.

Chewse was rapidly scaling up its sales teams in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles while preparing to launch new offices in Austin and Chicago. To expand and open these new locations, Chewse needed people who not only had the skills required but who were also a perfect match for the company’s unique culture. Internal employee referrals had dwindled, and Chewse explored its options with a contingency firm for extra support, but qualified candidates weren’t coming in fast enough. Job postings weren’t delivering the required ROI, and low application volumes limited their ability to grow.

As well, the recruitment process was time-consuming and frustrating for hiring managers and not focused on delivering a great candidate experience. If Chewse was going to meet its ambitious goals and launch their new markets on time, they needed to find a better way to hire.

A new partnership between Bandwidth and Chewse would help resolve many pain points and accelerate the hiring process.

In late 2018, Chewse welcomed Joe Bast to their team as VP of People & Operations; he previously led Leadership and Organizational Development for Amazon, The Cheesecake Factory, and Hootsuite. One of his goals was to build a robust hiring program and pipeline. As part of his new strategy, he selected Bandwidth to augment their internal talent acquisition team, immediately scale recruiting capacity, and help improve the overall hiring journey.

After analyzing the existing hiring process, Bandwidth and Chewse stakeholders developed a plan of action focused on three key areas:

Content
Bandwidth optimized the current Applicant Tracking System (ATS), refreshed the Chewse career site, developed new job ad content, and simplified its outreach templates, which helped the Chewse company story and core values stand out.

We also developed an interview and logistics briefing packet to help job candidates prepare for their on-site interviews. The packet included an overview of the Chewse company story, values, office location, and interview topics, as well as the job description.

Visibility
New sourcing, advertising, and candidate communication programs were implemented, resulting in a higher volume of applications. A new content and job syndication strategy increased applications by 14x, drawing candidates from a more comprehensive number of sources, including the Chewse Career page.

Process
Streamlined processes and new KPIs were deployed to engage the hiring team. Leveraging previously unused automation capabilities in the ATS reduced complexity and brought clarity to the interview, feedback, and logistics processes. These changes reduced the time between interview steps and enabled the collection of valuable data for future analysis.

Culture and values training, along with defined performance scorecards, helped to align all members of the hiring team in their search and could quickly identify strong candidates.

Using live hiring performance metrics, Bandwidth analyzed the hiring funnel and partnered with hiring managers to develop the right set of targets for each stage of the interview process to hit company goals.

“It just impressed me how much Bandwidth was able to get done, quickly and with such high quality.”
– Joe Bast, VP of People & Operations

Candidate interest in Chewse soared – a massive 14x increase in applications received – while a revamped interview process allowed the team to hire faster and make smarter hiring decisions.

Within six months, Chewse met their hiring goals – adding 25 to the team across five regions and celebrating the successful launch of their Austin and Chicago markets.

In all, the partnership delivered technology, content, and processes that will continue to serve Chewse well into the future, and an exceptional ROI with an Average Cost Per Hire that was less than half the cost of working with a legacy contingent agency.

Today, Bandwidth and Chewse have a strong partnership and will continue to eat together and thrive together as Chewse expands its presence nationally.