About Brakes UK
Brakes is the UK’s leading supplier to the foodservice sector. It is a subsidiary of Sysco, the world’s leading foodservice supplier, headquartered in Houston, Texas. With over 8,000 colleagues, Brakes is committed to providing its customers with outstanding service, products and foodservice solutions; its people with a great place to work; and its suppliers with a great company to partner.
Brakes recognises the importance of having a high quality, consistent approach to recruitment across its network. As part of a review of its recruitment processes, it recognised the opportunity to streamline its processes, identifying a single solution that could easily adapt to its recruitment needs and ensure a pipeline of quality applicants across supply chain, operations, and commercial roles.
“We didn’t want to use the same job boards that weren’t giving us significant ROI. A site may give you as many clicks as you want, but if they’re not converting to applications, it doesn’t make any sense.”
– Victoria Sengonca, Head of Resourcing, Brakes UK
Challenges
Appcast worked with Brakes to identify some key issues and immediate challenges:
- With a multi-site, multi-discipline workforce, much of Brakes’ recruitment marketing was decentralised, utilising multiple sources dictated by individual. This made it challenging to track the sites were working well for what jobs, and where recruitment budget was being least well used..
- Additionally, Brakes wanted a process that made best use of its own recruitment resources and to elevate the quality and number of applicants for each job post, while reducing the overall cost of recruitment.
“Our goal was to apply some logic to our recruitment marketing strategy. We wanted to put our jobs in one place where we knew our budget would be used effectively, and ideally, we could bring the spend down. And we did.”
– Victoria Sengonca, Head of Resourcing, Brakes UK
Solutions
A Programmatic Approach: Appcast’s programmatic solution optimised Brakes’ job advertising at scale, from start to finish. Distribution of Brakes’ jobs across a proprietary network of market-leading job sites meant they were getting the reach they needed, and programmatic rules and data ensured that the right jobs were advertised on the right sources: i.e. those that would deliver more qualified candidates.
Click-to-Hire Tracking: Via an enhanced integration with Brakes applicant tracking system (ATS), Appcast was able to track its performance from click to hire, down to each individual role. This enabled Appcast’s technology and team to further optimise the ad buying strategy, and gave Brakes a clear understanding of how its investment was performing.
Real-Time, Centralised Reporting: The Appcast dashboard gave Brakes 24/7 access to full-funnel metrics such as cost-per-applicant, cost-per-hire, cost-per-interview, and conversion rate across all of their job advertising campaigns. This avoided the need to analyse data from multiple sites, saving time and ensuring that Brakes’ recruitment team minimise time spent on reporting.
World-Class Customer Support: With a clear understanding of Brakes’ recruitment goals, the Appcast team managed its job advertising campaigns and provided meaningful insights along the way, making campaign adjustments and reallocating spend whenever needed.
“The best thing about Appcast is that I’m confident that their team wants to do the best they can within our budget. They're responsive, they make adjustments when needed, and they know what they're doing to drive traffic for us.”
– Victoria Sengonca, Head of Resourcing, Brakes UK
Results
- 4x increase in qualified applicants in first six months with Appcast
- 2x increase in hires for key roles including Supply Chain, Operations,
and Commercial - Significant decrease in cost-per-hire
