10 strauss_water_logo CommBox

How recruitment on WhatsApp drastically improved hiring rates

Food and beverage giant, Strauss, deployed an automated recruiting agent on messaging, automating initial interviews and screening for more efficient and effective hiring.

10 Strauss-Water-omnichannel-communication-service commbox

73%

Applicants screened automatically

44%

Reduction in
interview calls

30%

Reduction in operational costs

20%

Increase in
hiring rate

73%

Applicants screened automatically

44%

Reduction in
interview calls

30%

Reduction in operational costs

20%

Increase in
hiring rate

About Strauss Water

Strauss Water is a leading provider of water purification and filtration systems, serving millions of customers in the UK, Israel and China. The company is part of the Strauss Group, an international food product manufacturer that operates in 20 countries across the US, Europe, Middle East and Latin America. Strauss Water handles thousands of service calls every month through the support of contact center agents, technicians and installation specialists.

Industry

Food & Consumer Goods 

Channels & Integrations

WhatsApp, HCM

Teams

Human resources

Business Size

Medium size (500 – 1000)

Use Cases

  • 24/7 self-service
  • Bots on WhatsApp
  • Automated CV screening

Industry

Food & Consumer Goods 

Channels & Integrations

WhatsApp, HCM

Teams

Human resources

Business Size

Medium size (500 – 1000)

Use Cases

  • 24/7 self-service
  • Bots on WhatsApp
  • Automated CV screening

The Goal

Finding the perfect match in an ocean of resumes

Strauss Water has grown rapidly in recent years. With more products sold, service and support requests have also increased. This resulted in a great need for dozens of new agents and technical professionals.

Since the company adheres to the highest standards of product quality, innovation, and reliability, ensuring that they hire the best people is critical to maintaining success and ensuring growth.

However, as many as 24,000 resumes can come in one month. This makes going through all those resumes to identify the best candidates an impossible task.

The massive screening overhead

To complicate matters even more, finding the right fit doesn’t only entail identifying the right skills and experience. For some roles, such as field technicians, the candidate must also be willing to work shifts with late hours and to travel to multiple locations across the country to provide service.

The HR team was overwhelmed and needed a solution for several purposes: 

  • Alleviate the great burden of the screening phase 
  • Focus only on the right candidates, and accelerate the hiring process
  • Improve cost-efficiency 
  • Elevate the candidate experience 


To achieve these goals, Strauss looked for a flexible solution that would power them in the long run. Strauss identified CommBox as the proper solution for them, as it includes chat, business messaging (WhatsApp in specific), and automation in one interface, all their business requires for delivering exceptional experiences and business outcomes.

The Solution

Giving HR recruiters the superpower of automation

CommBox was selected by Strauss Water to help them overcome the talent acquisition challenges. An automated recruiter was integrated with ADAM, the company’s human resources management system (HRMS)

The automated recruiter engages with potential candidates over the WhatsApp messaging platform to execute the initial screening process. Among the questions used for identifying which applicants would not be the right are: 

  • Are you willing to work during evening hours?
  • Are you mobile and willing to drive to different locations? 
  • What are your salary expectations?


Once candidate screening and filtering are complete, the automated recruiter bot ranks the interview and transfers the data is transferred to the ADAM system. 

This alleviates a massive overhead from the talent acquisition team and gives them the freedom and focus to only engage with suitable candidates and advance the hiring process faster than ever.

“The battle for talent is fierce. We need to be very accurate in identifying and fast in connecting with the best candidates. The CommBox automated recruitment solution helps us do just that.”

Noa Zacharia, Sourcer at Strauss Water

The Result

Taking hiring higher with top-notch candidates

Strauss Water realized remarkable improvements in both target populations for recruitment – service agents and field technicians. And the accuracy of the matches was evident across the hiring lifecycle, from automated screening to the phone and even face-to-face interviews.

Streamlined screening & filtering 

The automated screening process delivered excellent results, with the automated recruiter filtering up to 80% of the initial applicants, (about 30% of applicants didn’t respond after applying). 

Automation-first approach cuts phone interview overloads by half

Ultimately, with recruiting automation on messaging, Strauss Water has cut 44%-50% of the workload of necessary calls for human recruiters. By running over 8000 automated interviews on WhatsApp, human recruiters could focus on calling the best-fit candidates and scheduling face-to-face interviews with the most promising ones. 
Moreover, after implementing automation, Strauss’s phone interview phase resulted in 50% more candidates being selected for in-person interviews, indicating a positive impact of the automation-first approach on the hiring process.

Enhanced hiring rates   

The implementation of an automated recruiter has reduced the workload by 50%, allowing human recruiters to increase their productivity by 20%, with only 70% of their workforce. This also indicates a 30% reduction in human costs. 

Finally, Strauss Water has achieved their main business goals: 

  • Alleviate the great burden of the screening phase by 50%  
  • Hiring rates improved by 20%, being able to focus only on the right candidates
  • Improved cost-efficiency, with 30% reduction in human costs 
  • Elevated experience, with highly satisfied candidates

“Applicants were very happy about being able to go through the first round of questions on WhatsApp. It’s easy, convenient, and saves them time. It also helps them to better understand the job requirements. We believe it makes a true difference by helping us deliver a unique candidate experience.”

Mor Vanunu, Talent Acquisition Manager at Strauss water

Automating the hire-to-retire process 

The power of automation can be leveraged for improving the full talent acquisition lifecycle – from screening, filtering, and matching candidates, to scheduling follow-up interviews, sending contracts, and signing candidates.
Organizations can also automate other processes that entail employee engagement, such as onboarding, training and development, company announcements, communicating benefits and compensation, and offboarding. And all of these processes can be streamlined on native messaging channels by CommBox.

Join the 67% of teams that hire best-fit talents with HR automation

According to recent studies, 64% of organizations are already using messaging channels for optimizing HR processes, and 67% are using AI-based automation to drive recruiting-related processes.
Strauss Water is a leader among them, having achieved exceptional results in improving the accuracy of identifying best-fit candidate, delivering innovative hiring engagements, and increasing the match rate, as they alleviate the burden on their talent acquisition team, and enable the business to grow.

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