How Nature's Pride Reduced Their Cost-per-Hire By More Than 80%

This is the story of Nature’s Pride, a major international fruits and vegetables’ supplier company, which exponential growth and demand for a steady pipeline of qualified candidates started to hamper the entire business.

We spoke to Carolien Molenaar (recruiter at Nature’s Pride) and Michelle Tanis (Online Marketing at Nature’s Pride) to tell us more about their journey from struggling to fill their candidates’ pipeline to finding a long-term solution, which also helps them shorten their Time-to-Hire and significantly reduce their Cost-per-Hire.

“Now that the company is growing so rapidly, we want to make sure that we’ll have the capacity to attract talent on our own.” explains Carolien from Nature’s Pride.

At that time, Nature’s Pride was growing at a steady pace and so did their recruitment needs. In a highly-competitive market and using traditional recruiting approach, the company soon found itself incapable to successfully recruit for any of their four target groups: Procurement, Sales, Production Planning and Logistics: “We used to work together with recruitment agencies, but we soon realised that this way we were not growing our internal recruitment team know-how.”, adds Carolien. Another struggle for Nature’s Pride was finding a way to target candidates with a certain soft skills’ set (e.g. proactiveness, entrepreneurship, etc.) rather than a job category qualification.

All these urged Nature’s Pride to consider taking recruitment in-house in 2009. The first step was soon taken – attracting a new Recruitment Manager, Mr. Erik Molendijk., who would further lead the change.

Some of the first changes Erik administered were: updating the company website, implementing a new ATS system, hiring extra team members, and introducing a new format for writing the job vacancies:

“We started focusing on target group marketing and employer branding, just like VONQ recommended. We also started paying special attention to creating the text for the job ads. For creating attractive job ad copy and structure we’ve relied on VONQ’s expertise, too. Their advice was for applying modern and clean writing style and this proved very successful in our rather traditional industry and also aligned very well with our overall marketing efforts.”, Michelle Tanis further explains.

Job marketing proved highly effective for Nature’s Pride continual and ever-growing recruitment needs. Next to that, as Michelle Tanis continues explaining, in collaboration with VONQ, Nature’s Pride focused also on creating and executing a robust recruitment marketing campaign for a specific target group campaign to further reinforce job marketing:

“We are putting a lot of effort into boosting our employer brand even further: we write articles and we distribute these on niche channels; we set Google campaigns; we are using the full potential of social media; and we are also engaging in remarketing. Because we combined Google Analytics in another reporting tool together with our new ATS, we are now capable of measuring both the quantity and the quality of applicants coming from the different channels and target group campaigns. Some of the results? Receiving qualified applications soon after distributing a vacancy online.”.

The outcome: 1) Shorter Time-to-Hire, 2) Lower Cost-per-Hire, and 3) Fully in control of our recruitment marketing process!

For streamlining their job marketing efforts, Nature’s Pride started utilising VONQ’s Job Marketing and soon started to notice the positive outcomes:

“The greatest thing about VONQ’s Job Marketing is that you have access to all the media channels you’d need and that they are already pre-contracted, so that based on the specific job ad requirements you can easily select the most relevant channel. Just a few clicks and there you go – your order’s been placed and VONQ also has the capacity to take care of all the postings for you. So basically you manage all your job ads from a single account. This is extremely efficient because it saves you a great amount of time!”, adds Carolien.

Caroline further explains: “Our Cost-per-Hire dropped to less than EUR 1,000. Compared to the average, which is EUR 3681, that’s a great result!”. Caroline continues:

“When you work with a recruitment agency, depending on the specific job, you need to invest somewhere around EUR 6,000 euros. This number can, however, easily increase to EUR 20,000 or more depending on the type of job vacancy.”

The main benefits from working with VONQ, Caroline summarises at the end, are: “Being fully in control of our recruitment process, the ability to measure results on our own, and the possibility to do it all from a single place – VONQ’s Job Marketing.”.

Are you eager to check how Job Marketing can help you solve your organisation’s pressing recruitment challenges?

Is it difficult for you to reach your desired target audience? Is your employer brand in need of improvement? Or, are you simply curious to learn if there is anything you can change about your recruitment strategy to give it an instant boost? Request today A FREE DEMO!

Nature’s Pride in Maasdijk (The Netherlands) is a supplier of a large assortment (over 500) of exotic fruits and vegetables from over 70 countries. The company is considered one of the most innovative in its field.