AUTOR: PASCAL FRICK
Since 2023, MS Direct has been offering WhatsApp as a quick and easy application channel in the recruitment process to cover its high demand for seasonal employees. With great success, as it turns out. We met Michel Becker, Head of People Operations, and asked him how he managed to reduce external personnel costs to zero with WhatsApp.
Michel, what makes recruiting in the logistics services sector a particular challenge?
In order fulfillment and returns, we operate in a very volatile business. A large proportion of our staff work in our warehouses, where they take care of our customers’ orders and returns. This means that our staffing requirements are always influenced by the order volume, which can fluctuate greatly depending on the season. We are therefore also looking for many employees who are flexible in terms of time. Especially in the peak seasons, i.e. the months from May to July and November to January, we quickly fill 150 to 300 additional positions.
Michel & Erlinda talk about their experience with the tool
Why did you decide to use an additional recruitment channel?
This recruitment effort is a major challenge for our team and also involves high costs. In the past, we have repeatedly had to hire external staff to fill all positions. This naturally increased our operating costs.
In 2023, MS Direct founded a new company in Germany. This was an additional challenge for us: nobody knew us there. We therefore set ourselves goals at the beginning of 2023. We wanted to become independent of external recruitment and also make our application processes faster and simpler. To do this, we needed another application channel that would make us stand out from the crowd, and that’s when we finally came across the WhatsApp solution from Pasta HR.
Why is WhatsApp the right tool for your application process?
One of the biggest advantages is that everyone knows WhatsApp. We can suddenly reach a whole new group of applicants. People who struggle with application dossiers and emails can now apply to us in just a few minutes via a simple chat. And very importantly, they receive immediate feedback on their qualifications or a rejection if they don’t fit the job profile. Simple, honest and fast. This has had an effect: We have received a lot of positive feedback from our applicants about the service and were able to fill all positions independently last year.
The WhatsApp solution is provided by PastaHR. How exactly did they support you in optimizing the process?
First of all, I have to mention that the solution was set up super quickly. We were ready to go live within a week. And after just a short time, our time-to-hire was already extremely reduced.
Thanks to the qualification questions that we can predefine in the chat, the PastaHR tool automatically makes an initial pre-selection for us and directly rejects unqualified candidates. On the one hand, this saves us a huge amount of time and, at the same time, the direct feedback also improves our candidate experience.
As a result, the new tool has also improved our ability to plan in the recruiting team and we have reduced our external personnel costs to zero. Goal achieved, in other words.
How do you currently use WhatsApp and what else do you have planned?
We currently only offer the WhatsApp application process for operational and warehouse staff positions, as this is where we have by far the greatest recruitment needs. In the long term, however, we would also like to offer the service for all other positions so that specialists can also apply to us more easily and quickly in future. After all, we are a company that invests a lot in technology and automation, and in my opinion this also includes an advanced application process.