Chili's Hot Interview
Makeover
Chili’s would love to grow its
restaurant chain faster, but finding management talent is a
challenge. VP Jan Barr has at least one solution to the
problem. An online interviewing system is helping to manage
résumé flow and identify stronger candidates earlier in the
assessment process.
By Rachael King
 f Jan Barr harbored any doubts about
implementing an online interview system at Chili’s, they
disappeared two years ago when she attended a conference at
the Crowne Plaza in Dallas. There, in the atrium-style lobby
dripping with greenery, she sat chatting with an in-house
recruiter.
Barr, vice president of
human resources, casually asked her colleague how long it took
her to open the résumés that Chili’s received electronically.
The answer stunned Barr: it took one full day per week just to
glance at all the résumés. At the time, Chili’s didn’t have a
screening tool, so the recruiter would manually open as many
as 1,500 résumés every week. "All of a sudden I thought, This
is crazy," says Barr.
Obstacles to
growth
Barr knew that her department
would have to become much more efficient to handle the growth
that Chili’s parent company, Brinker International, wanted to
see. Brinker’s long-term business model calls for 10 to 12
percent annual growth in new restaurants. In a speech at an
investor conference in June, Brinker CFO Charles Sonsteby said
he saw Chili’s as one of the primary drivers for the company’s
near-term growth. Chili’s currently contributes 59 percent of
the company’s revenue and 73 percent of the company’s profits.
There are now 887 Chili’s restaurants, but Sonsteby thinks the
company can grow to 1,500. It doesn’t take an economist to
figure out that if Brinker can grow Chili’s, it should be able
to grow profits.
Still, Sonsteby has
acknowledged that growing Chili’s at 10 to 12 percent annually
is a challenge. "We’d probably love to be building Chili’s
faster, but the problem there is finding management talent,"
he said in a Q&A session after his speech. "The
restriction on Chili’s...is more on finding managers and
getting them trained than on return on invested
capital."
Sitting in taxis
This need for new managers has inspired many changes in Barr’s
department. "If we'd kept doing things the way we’d been doing
them, we would not have been able to find enough managers,"
says Barr. When she began to assess productivity in her
department, she discovered that her recruiters spent far too
much time with candidates who were eventually not hired.
Recruiters conducted 10 to 12 one-hour interviews each day. On
average, the company hired only one out of every 12
restaurant-management candidates interviewed. Not only that,
but recruiters and human resources managers such as Warren
Boone spent nearly 50 to 70 percent of the month traveling to
interview new candidates. Chili’s found that much of the time
recruiters spent in airport lounges and taxis was
unproductive.
After the revelation
at the Crowne Plaza, Barr devoted more resources to managing
the résumés received from Chilisjobs.com and
online job boards such as Monster. She and her team soon
settled on Behavior Description Technologies’ online
interviewing program called e.ssessor. Initially, the program
didn’t fit Chili’s needs, so Warren Boone worked closely with
the company to make some adjustments, like managing résumé
flow.
With this assessment tool,
candidates enter basic information such as contact specifics,
education, work history and desired salary. Unlike some other
online assessment tools, however, it includes questions that
use a behavioral-interview technique. Those behavioral
questions ask candidates to give specific information about
past performance and how they’ve risen to challenges. Experts
like Charles Handler, president of Rocket-Hire, consider a
behavioral interview to be many times more effective than an
unstructured interview. Chili’s asks candidates, for example,
to describe the most effective idea they implemented to boost
employee morale and create a positive work environment.
Candidates then provide contact information for someone who
can verify the answer. Chili’s can then download candidates’
success stories to review.
Boone
says these behavioral questions save time because when Chili’s
then conducts follow-up interviews, it can get right to the
sticky points immediately. By using a behavioral interview up
front, even one that’s online, as opposed to an unstructured
one in person, he and other recruiters have avoided wasting
time with preliminary screening interviews. Today, Boone
spends about 3 to 5 percent of his time traveling for
recruiting purposes, down from 50 to 70 percent. And instead
of hiring one out of every 12 candidates interviewed, Chili’s
now hires one out of seven.
Freeing up
staff
As a result of this new
efficiency, Chili’s is changing the structure of its human
resources department and will no longer employ full-time
recruiters. Instead, the current recruiters will train to
become human resources managers. Besides recruiting, these
employees will take on other responsibilities, such as
employee relations and working closely with their regional
directors of operations on human resources
initiatives.
One of those
initiatives will be to help find candidates from other
industries. While there are enough managers in the
casual-dining industry for Chili’s to grow at a medium pace,
there simply aren’t enough for it to grow at a fast pace, Barr
says. So Chili’s is looking for managers from other industries
such as retail, grocery stores and hospitals. The online
interview has been helpful for human resources managers in
comparing people with different kinds of experience to those
with casual-dining experience.
At
the end of the online interview, Chili’s asks candidates how
they felt about this screening process versus traditional
screening processes. "What we wanted to do was make sure that
this was something our candidates appreciated," says Boone.
About 80 percent of the job candidates really like the
process, he says. On average, about 60 to 70 percent of the
candidates complete the entire interview, but Chili’s can also
see the answers of the applicants who don’t finish. This
allows Chili’s to call candidates who seem promising and
encourage them to finish the process.
Investment
pays
So far, Barr says, senior
management has also been pleased with the results. The online
interview program was implemented 18 months ago, and it
achieved ROI within the first six months because of reduced
travel by recruiters.
In the future,
Chili’s may add other features to the system, so applicants
can use it to provide information for criminal-background
checks and references. Says Boone: "We see it as a kind of
gateway or portal to a greater possibility in the future."
Workforce Online, July 2003 --
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Rachael King is a writer based in Pittsburgh. To comment,
e-mail editors@workforce.com.
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