Dollar General Corporation has been delivering value to shoppers for over 75 years. Dollar General helps shoppers Save time. Save money. Every day!® by offering products that are frequently used and replenished, such as food, snacks, health and beauty aids, cleaning supplies, basic apparel, house wares and seasonal items at low everyday prices in convenient neighborhood locations. With more than 12,000 stores in 43 states, Dollar General is America’s largest small-box multi-price point discount retailer. In addition to high quality private brands, Dollar General sells products from America's most-trusted manufacturers such as Clorox, Energizer, Procter & Gamble, Hanes, Coca-Cola, Mars, Unilever, Nestle, Kimberly-Clark, Kellogg's, General Mills, and PepsiCo.
Dollar General realized the need to make their application process more appealing to their large applicant population. Accessibility from mobile devices and tablets was seen as a solution to this problem so that the overall applicant experience is second to none and Dollar General would not lose those candidates that would prefer to apply from a device. The user interface needed to have a seamless integration with their WOTC provider so that mobile users and desktop users alike were considering equally. Other ATS providers are not able to provide this critical integration that is essential to the Dollar General P&L.
The decision was made to implement IBM Brassring On cloud’s Mobile Apply technology. This would allow applicants to use any device to search for jobs, apply to jobs and create a candidate profile, and take any necessary assessments that relate to the job. All of this technology was combined into one mobile responsive design that would resize the screen to any device the applicant chose to use.
Before - Dollar General applicants would attempt to use a tablet or mobile device to search and apply to jobs but the candidate experience was not up to par with many screens not rendering properly and enhancing to the size of the applicant’s screen.After – Dollar General was a true pioneer in the Mobile Apply functionality and they have seen an uptick in candidate flow as well as around 40% of all applicants applying to Dollar General jobs from a mobile device of some sort. This percentage alone tells us how important it was to implement such a feature.
IBM was able to utilize an IBM advanced metrics tool that has yet to be released to dig deep into how the mobile functionality is paying dividends when it comes to applicant flow and abandonment rates. Initial numbers show that approximately 40% of total applicants are applying via a mobile device. After this technology was communicated to applicants by Dollar General, we saw abandonment rate on mobile devices decrease by about 25%. The belief is that applicants were using mobile devices to simply look into careers at Dollar General but thought the application process would be too cumbersome from their mobile device. Or, they knew that the process before the technology was much more difficult than just finding a job, writing a mental note, and then going to a computer to apply. Dollar General started tell their applicants that they can use their mobile device for the entire experience, from searching for jobs to completing an assessment. This is when we saw abandonment go from 80% to 55%. IBM was able to dig a bit deeper into exactly where applicants were abandoning and found that of those that did abandon their session, about 55% were before they had to enter any personal information. So we’ve seen that some candidates are still using the tool to search for jobs and once they begin the application process from their mobile device, a small percentage are abandoning.
IBM - Kenexa Brassring on Cloud - Mobile Apply functionality
It's simple - when talking about the number of applications Dollar General receives in any given year, Dollar General knew that they had to appeal to every candidate and they had to give a good impression to the applicant by having a top notch candidate experience. They have opened doors to many applicants that might have given up on applying in the past or that didn’t have access to a computer. This solution is two-fold; it provides an ease of use for applicants and it enhances their applicant pool.
The art of recruiting is a process that everyone is attempting to nail down and the Dollar General team has built a process for success, one that will be modeled by many more IBM customers. Looking at the changes in data from day to day was a very bright moment in our weekly calls and daily correspondence. Once applicants were made aware of this new technology, the numbers spoke and we truly realized the power of the solution that we all worked so hard to deliver.
