Merivale: High-Volume Recruitment for a Winning Hospitality Brand

Situation

In late 2021, Merivale was formally awarded the contract to manage the hospitality venues in the Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG) and the Sydney Football Stadium (SFS). This opportunity represented a new approach to dining at Sydney’s major sporting venues, moving away from the traditional fast food stadium experience toward more refined dining that will enhance the stadium experience.

However, the Sydney hospitality market was facing a crisis. After two years of border closures, the hospitality workforce was decimated. Plus, the uncertainty around the lifting of lockdown restrictions meant that Merivale received confirmation of their appointment to the stadium contract with only six weeks to prepare before the Ashes test would be held at the SCG.

Merivale came to PeopleScout with a challenge—to source over 800 roles in one of the tightest talent markets in a generation.

Challenge accepted!

Solution

PeopleScout needed to act fast. We quickly mobilised Affinix™, our proprietary talent acquisition suite, to capture expressions of interest from potential applicants. We built an online application form and campaign page that would educate applicants on the opportunities at Merivale, and through the dynamic application form, automatically categorized candidates into Merivale’s role streams of:

• Bar staff
• Wait staff
• Cashiers

PeopleScout knew that speed was essential due both to our short timeframe and the highly mobile nature of hospitality candidates—we had to act fast! PeopleScout implemented a tech-powered talent acquisition solution through which eligible applicants were immediately invited to complete a video interview following their application. If applicants had not completed the video interview within 24 hours of submitting their application, our Center of Excellence team followed up to conduct a live phone interview. The PeopleScout Center of Excellence vetted all video interviews and phone screens, and successful candidates were handed over to Merivale for offer and onboarding.

Evolution

The PeopleScout team worked tirelessly in the lead-up to the New Year’s Ashes test, and we were able to fill the 800 roles for the Merivale stadium launch—in just six weeks.

Following the success of the first phase of the hospitality launch, Merivale engaged PeopleScout to source the talent they required to support the hospitality venues across both the SCG and SFS for the remainder of the year. Merivale needed a total talent pool of 3,000 skilled hospitality workers including those with fine dining experience, like chefs and front of house staff and retail personnel.

Following the Ashes pilot, Merivale had a better understanding of the candidate profiles they needed, so PeopleScout worked closely with the Merivale team to profile nine job categories across three job families. Candidate responses were screened using AI-powered tools in Affinix to dynamically filter them into qualified roles.

PeopleScout leveraged Affinix to build real-time analytics dashboards which helped us build the insight gained through the first round of recruiting into the decision-making process. In Affinix, we tracked candidate sources and engagement levels and fed this insight back to the Merivale marketing team so they could direct their activities to the channel which yielded the greatest results. Leveraging the CRM tool in Affinix, we also encouraged referrals from current Merivale staff and alumni.

PeopleScout maintained the same high-touch approach and fast turnaround for video and phone screening. We collaborated closely with the Merivale team to assess our results completing, spot audits throughout the process to ensure the team maintains high-quality hires and achieves the best possible outcome.

Results

PeopleScout was able to generate so much trust from Merivale that they gave our team permission to make direct offers to candidates without validation from the Merivale team.

In an extremely challenging talent market, PeopleScout achieved a time-to-offer of just 3.36 days and a time to fill of 5.5 days. PeopleScout is on track to source the volume of candidates Merivale needs, and with the SFS launching in late 2022, this requirement continues to grow.