Helping Burger King Expand In Mumbai

Executive Summary

The American fast food giant Burger King has been actively expanding in India over the past 2 years. In Mumbai, with 3 outlets already operating, Burger King was looking to open 7 more and decided to rely on our expertise to hire their crew members.

This is the story of how Aasaanjobs helped Burger King with the challenges of recruiting their crew members in Mumbai and helped them scale.

The First Recruitment Drive
Hiring Mandate

Having taken over hiring crew members for all of 3 operating and 7 new outlets, we were asked to start with hiring 80 new crew members.

The mandate required candidates to be in the age group of 18 to 28 years with a minimum education qualification of being a 10th pass in order to become a crew member. The selected candidates, before being hired would also need to take a medical test. Hired crew members would receive a stipulated amount as salary and would work on rotational shifts of 9 hours each.(9AM to 6PM, 12PM to 9PM, 5PM to 2AM) with one weekday off. Additionally, the crew members would also receive a one and a half months of training at running the outlets once selected.

Perceived Challenges

After discussing the mandate with the management at Burger King and through our own experience we knew that the mandate had its set of challenges.

Firstly, although the salary range seemed to be similar to what was provided to crew members by competitors as well, it was not going to be an easy task to convince 18 to 28-year-olds.

Furthermore, the 5 PM to 2 AM shift and getting one weekday off instead of a traditional Sunday was also going to be a challenge.

Recruitment Drive

We were aggressive in our approach and scheduled 27 drives in the first 2 months, which meant that a drive was conducted every 48 hours to ensure that the fresh outlets could go into operations as soon as possible and there was no shortage of crew members. Our job was to send candidates to the interview location post which the Burger King management took over. They would shortlist the right candidates and then ask them to proceed to the assigned location for medical tests.

However, in spite of the high number of interviews conducted things did not go as planned. A considerable number of candidates who had confirmed their intention to join Burger King did not show up to work. Only 32% of the selected candidates joined Burger King.

The Second Recruitment Drive

After the first recruitment drive we were given another mandate for 50 more crew members.

Reflection On The First Drive

Since the results from the first drive did not match our expectations and quality standards, we decided to dig in and find out what went wrong.

We realised that a major amount of candidates dropped out right after selection and did not proceed for the medical tests. On talking to the existing employees we realised that other candidates had either found other opportunities and some found it a hassle to travel to another location for medical checks.There was also very little follow-up done from the management to ensure these candidates would go for medical checkups and proceed to join. Also one of the challenges that we faced that the applicants were not aware of what exactly are the benefits of PF and ESIC components of their salary.

Recruitment Drive

This time we decided to take matters into our own hands and see to it that the selected candidates would go for medical checks and then join. Our internal team would now be in charge of following through with the candidates and see through the process right till the joinings. We were going to follow the simple guidelines we had laid out for ourselves.

Results & Future Prospects

During the first recruitment drive we were able to achieve a fulfilment rate of 51% with 41 joinings. The numbers shot up immediately once we conducted the second recruitment drive to 72% with 36 new crew members joining. Over 80% of candidates lined up and recruited in the second drive were freshers in the 18-22 year old age group.

With the success of the second drive, Aasaanjobs became the largest supplier of crew members for Burger King, Mumbai. After successfully becoming a part of Burger King’s expansion story in QSR market in Mumbai, we are now currently helping them expand in Bangalore as well.