Candidate Experience

From 500 to 5,000: How Wolt maintains good Candidate Experience while hiring at scale

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Experiencing Recruitment Challenges?

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ATS Integration
SmartRecruiters
Candidates
100,000 each year
Employees
5,000+
Industry
Quick Commerce

Experiencing Recruitment Challenges?

Learn more

About Wolt

Wolt is a Helsinki-based technology company that makes it incredibly easy to discover and get the best restaurants, grocery stores, and other local shops delivered to you. Wolt’s mission is to make cities better places for customers, merchants, and couriers alike.Wolt’s local commerce platform makes it easy for customers to order whatever they need on one app, for merchants to make additional sales, and for couriers to make meaningful earnings flexibly. To enable this, Wolt develops a wide range of technologies from local logistics to retail software and financial solutions, as well as operates its own grocery stores under the brand Wolt Market.

Disclaimer: Shaun was Head of Talent Acquisition at time of writing. He has since transferred into becoming Wolt's Head of People Development.

Shaun Rudden, Head of Talent Excellence at Wolt. His team brings together talent technology, analytics, and marketing/branding to help improve how they approach talent acquisition and development at Wolt.

Prior to this, Shaun was the Talent Acquisition Lead at Wolt, focussing on overseeing the non-tech Talent Acquisition team across a range of markets. Shaun is an advocate for ensuring the Candidate Experience is positive, regardless of the outcome.

Wolt’s Recruitment Challenge

  • Required a huge growth to meet customer demand in the space of 18 months
  • Candidates are customers, so ensuring that the Candidate Experience was great was a huge priority – mission being ‘excite and delight customers’
  • Continuously deliver positive candidate experience whilst growing at an incredible rate

Wolt’s global growth meant their employee base increased from 500 people in late 2019 to over 5,000 people at the start of 2022. There’s more. Wolt’s mission is to excite and delight customers, and candidates are, in fact, customers. That’s why the talent acquisition team wants to keep on delivering a positive Candidate Experience while growing at an incredible rate. How to do both at the same time?

From top left: Mark Berendsen (Starred), Jon Daye (Sapia.ai), Shaun Rudden (Wolt) and Andy Cammack (SmartRecruiters)

Huge growth ambitions

As demand for Wolt grew, the need for more people within their organization increased rapidly as they needed to fulfill the demand. Wolt’s customer base has faced unprecedented growth during the pandemic and as such was putting increasing pressure on current resources, resulting in a huge growth target for Shaun and his team.

Therefore, Wolt’s TA team decided that they wanted to overhaul the hiring process to ensure they could effectively and efficiently hire at scale.

Candidates are customers

As with a lot of B2C brands, Wolt’s candidates are all potential customers for their business. This means that Wolt has to not only consider Candidate Experience from a human-centric angle, but also a financial one too because the loss of customers due to a negative experience can impact their bottom line.

Wolt’s TA team wanted to ensure that all candidates that went through the candidate process at Wolt felt positively about it after; whether they were successful in their application or not.

Managing positive Candidate Experience with huge growth

As with many companies rapidly scaling, it’s often hard to ensure that processes scale effectively with that. Shaun wanted to ensure that as they continued to grow that Candidate Experience wouldn’t be a secondary thought and was always at the forefront of the Talent Acquisition teams mind.

Wolt wanted to continuously innovate without a negative impact on the Candidate Experience.

How Starred Solved the Challenge

  • Shaun Rudden wanted a recruitment stack to support Wolt’s ambitions
  • Collect and measure Candidate Experience – Starred automates the collection of feedback and provides tangible insights
  • Optimize the surveys

Utilize recruitment tech

Starred’s solution allowed Wolt to keep track of Candidate Experience at every stage of the Candidate Journey, from the moment the candidates applied to Wolt to the moment they were hired (or rejected). It would be impossible for the team to manually collect feedback from candidates at each stage. Starred connects directly with their ATS, SmartRecruiters, and allows Wolt to fully automate the collection, measurement, and analysis of Candidate Experience data.

Collect Candidate Experience data at scale

With thousands of applications each year, Wolt are now able to collect their Candidate Experience data at scale to ensure they are able to analyze and dive deeper into the insights provided. Starred’s Candidate Experience Insights platform automates the collection of Candidate Experience feedback and turns them into actionable insights.

“Starred helped Wolt focus within a period of scaling.”

[$quote]Shaun Rudden[$quote]
[$quote]
Head of Talent Excellence[$quote]

Optimize and utilize the data

When scaling up quickly, Wolt had to put new software and processes in place in order to cope with the immense rise of candidates. But, in order to preserve the Candidate Experience, Wolt used Starred to A/B test new processes and its impact on the experience of candidates. For example: the use of Sapia.ai. Wolt found that using Sapia helped improve their Candidate Experience scores. This is because Wolt found a strong correlation between feedback and candidate NPS, and Sapia removed the manual element of this allowing them to provide feedback to candidates at scale.

Twilio Candidate Experience
Wolt used Starred to A/B test new processes and its impact on the experience of candidates. For example: the use of Sapia.ai
“Wolt have been able to develop new ways of working within Talent Acquisition without a knock on effect to Candidate Experience with the analytics from Starred.”

[$quote]Shaun Rudden[$quote]
[$quote]
Head of Talent Excellence[$quote]

Internal Growth

Handling the immense growth, the TA team had to grow by about 30-40 people which makes it more tedious to keep track of each recruiter’s performance and impact on the Candidate Experience. Shaun used Starred’s Priority Matrix to keep track of each recruiter’s strengths and weaknesses. Shaun and his team use these insights to identify opportunities within the recruitment team, highlighting areas that are performing well as well as areas that could be improved.

“Our partnership with Starred has allowed us to better understand our candidates and their needs, which has enabled us to make changes within our processes that drive efficiencies without hindering or harming the candidates we interact with.”

[$quote]Shaun Rudden[$quote]
[$quote]
Head of Talent Excellence[$quote]

Webinar: Recruitment Reinvented by Wolt

It was our pleasure to be joined by Wolt, SmartRecruiters, and Sapia.ai on the webinar ‘Recruitment Reinvented: How to boost Recruitment Productivity & maintain excellent Candidate Experience.’ If you want to watch the entire webinar, the video is linked below.

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