- Challenge: An old-school applicant tracking system with limited sourcing, nurturing, and analytics capabilities deterred Jackson Family Wines from being able to find and engage top talent and hire quality candidates to fill roles at locations worldwide.
- Solution: Upgrading to Jobvite’s built-for-purpose, enterprise ATS software offered the company’s recruiting staff a more advanced, user-friendly hiring platform that ultimately helped it better find and connect with professionals to fill a variety of key roles across the business and in offices across the globe.
- Results: Jackson Family Wines hire more than 200 employees via referrals submitted into Jobvite mere months after onboarding our ATS. Moreover, the company’s average time to hire declined considerably, and the recruiting team improved its daily productivity and collaboration, leading to quicker and smarter hiring.
If you’re a wine enthusiast, you’re probably familiar with Jackson Family Wines. The wine production company owns 35-plus wine brands in North America — including its namesake, Kendall-Jackson — as well as throughout Italy, France, Chile, Australia and, South Africa.
While the company is family-owned and -run, Jackson Family Wines has over 1,400 employees worldwide, with roles ranging from production and viticulture, to marketing and consumer sales.
Jackson Family Wines’ recruiting team works hard to build a quality, talented team. However, finding high-quality candidates in such a niche industry has proven difficult in recent years.
Headquartered in Santa Rosa, CA — a more rural area approximately an hour north of San Francisco — the company has a hard time recruiting employees in such a small community.
Plus, after years of reliance on an outdated ATS, the recruitment team faced sluggish processes and lack of automated outreach that slowed down hiring efforts and prevented progress.
So, the business decided it was time for a more advanced hiring solution and began researching ATS options. After an industry contact recommended Jobvite to a former recruiting manager, the company put the platform to the test — and was sold almost immediately.
“Before Jobvite, we used a less effective ATS for our recruiting needs, but it just didn’t get the job done,” said Jackson Family Wines Recruiting Specialist Kristina Kearnan.
“It wasn’t clean or user- friendly, and we needed something that all of our hiring managers could maneuver through without problems,” Kristina added. “With Jobvite, it’s been like night and day. It has exactly what we were looking for.”
Now, with increased productivity, better social integration and advanced hiring data reporting, Jackson Family Wines is poised for major success — starting with its employees.
Jackson Family Wines sheds outdated hiring processes — and tech — thanks to Jobvite
For Jackson Family Wines, Jobvite’s automated hiring approval process sealed the deal when it came time to make their decision regarding which applicant tracking system to invest in.
Before implementing Jobvite, the company’s recruiting org relied on a paper-based system, where hiring managers would transfer forms between a minimum of three to four employees to gain approval and receive final sign off. Throw multiple offices across four different continents into the mix, and it’s not surprising the process grew incredibly difficult and time consuming.
Today, Jobvite‘s automated approvals streamline Jackson Family Wines’ entire hiring workflow.
“With our previous ATS, getting the correct approvals in a small window of time was a pain,” said Kristina. “Now, employees and hiring managers don’t have to call and ask about the status of requisitions. Instead, they can go into the system and look for themselves.”
Kristina added that requisition requests to get new postings posted actually get approved more quickly than they ever used to, “which is something that we’re all very grateful for.”
Jobvite has even cut Jackson Family Wines’ time to hire by an average of two months.
With newfound time savings and enhanced team productivity, the company has been able to increase its focus on recruiting top talent to fill its international job opportunities and staff its offices with the best in the industry so they can continue to drive the business forward.
Sourcing top talent and securing referrals becomes much easier with Jobvite’s ATS
Another challenge for Jackson Family Wines? The recruiting team is faced with a smaller talent pool than your average wine company, gives their considerable distance from any major cities.
Furthermore, the winemaking industry isn’t as expansive as others. That, according to Kristina, makes locating candidates for very particular roles takes a unique set of tools.
“Hiring at our company can definitely be tough, because we’re outside a major city that draws talent away from us,” said Kristina. “It’s a bit of a struggle being located where we are.”
To tackle this challenge head on, the Jackson recruiting team looked to Jobvite to help leverage external networks to bring in fresh talent. With Jobvite’s Publisher tool, Kristina and her team are constantly connecting and sourcing, and can push hiring updates to their personal networks.
“Our former ATS had no social media capabilities whatsoever, so being able to reach out to individual social media networks is huge,” Kristina explained. “That capability has earned us numerous interviews and even several successful hires made specifically due to the power of our social networks. We’ve filled over 200 positions via referrals, thanks to Jobvite.”
By leveraging Jobvite’s social publishing component, Jackson Family Wines has been able to broaden the scope and reach of its own networks and successfully support a revamped employee referral program to expand its talent pool.
Jobvite’s advanced reporting empowers data-driven recruiting and keeps other hiring stakeholders up to speed on progress
With an increase in socially referred candidates and productivity, headcount growth measurement became an important third pillar of Jackson Family Wines’ recruiting strategy.
As the company prepares for even more growth in the coming years, tracking progress is essential for understanding what works and what doesn’t when it comes to recruiting. However, Jackson Family Wines’ previous ATS didn’t allow for much reporting on this important data.
“Our old ATS had very basic reports, with no customization capability whatsoever,” said Kristina.
With Jobvite, the Jackson recruiting department has been able to actively measure hiring progress and track success much more easily. “Jobvite gives us another way to report to our department — and company as a whole — all of the success we’ve seen,” Kristina added. “It’s important to make others aware of what’s going on in our department, so everyone is on the same page.”
As Jackson Family Wines follows it’s path of robust expansion, its hiring and recruiting departments will continue to leverage Jobvite as a partner in talent sourcing and acquisition.
Thanks to its social integration, simplified approval process and advanced reporting capabilities, Jobvite has enabled Jackson Family Wines to fortify an already excellent talent base and will continue to do so with quality hires in the coming years.
