How Dutch Bros Cut Time to Fill by More Than 50% with Hiring Automation

Nine people. That’s the entire talent acquisition team responsible for hiring across Dutch Bros Coffee’s 25,000 employees in 24 states, and it isn’t a staffing gap waiting to be filled. It’s the plan. Getting there meant giving up a hiring process that ran shop by shop, decision by decision, in favor of one built to largely run itself.

Breanna Buchanan, Director of Talent Acquisition at Dutch Bros, walked through how that shift happened, moving from patching hiring gaps store by store to running one connected, automated system. 

Watch the full session here, or read the highlights below.

What Was Slowing Down Dutch Bros’ Decentralized Hiring Model?

Before Phenom, talent acquisition at Dutch Bros ran on manual processes spread across multiple systems, an approach Buchanan candidly summed up as, “We like to say that we’re a little bit of a startup still, even though we’re pretty large.” Recruiting worked shop by shop instead of as one connected system, and the team spent most of its energy reacting to open positions rather than building pipelines ahead of them.

That reactive posture showed up in the numbers. Time to fill sat at 28 days, slow for a quick-service brand hiring the volume of hourly workers Dutch Bros needed to keep pace with new shop openings. Dutch Bros also runs a decentralized hiring model, where shop managers and operators at every location handle their own hiring, so any new process had to work for someone squeezing in interviews between rushes, not a corporate recruiter at a desk.

Buchanan pointed to a less obvious obstacle behind the technology gap, one rooted in executive buy-in. Before the company’s chief people officer joined, she recalled, “we didn’t have that executive buy-in” for investing in AI and automation.

How Do You Rebuild a Hiring Team Without Growing Headcount?

Buchanan’s team treated the technology switch as a chance to rethink the whole function, not just replace a system. “We knew that we had to completely transform not just the technology... but also take the chance to really evaluate our team structure,” she explained. The team looks different today than it did in 2024, restructured to operate at Dutch Bros’ new pace.

Central to that redesign was building a talent attraction function from scratch: a proactive counterpart to the reactive recruiting team. Instead of shop managers calling in with urgent openings, the attraction team now builds candidate pipelines before a shop’s doors even open. “Now they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can see the results from your attraction team. They’re really delivering talent to me before I even have to think about it,’” Buchanan noted of the shift.

Dutch Bros paired that restructuring with a set of Phenom tools built around the frontline candidate experience. Phenom Career Site gives candidates a branded place to explore roles and opt in via their Talent Community for future openings — including in markets Dutch Bros hasn’t entered yet. Phenom Chatbot handles a meaningful share of that volume on its own; since launching in September 2025, more than 50,000 people have applied through it.

Related: The Employer Branding Strategy Behind Dutch Bros’ Career Site Success

On the hiring manager side, Phenom’s vast hiring automations combined with Phenom Automated Interview Scheduling removed the back-and-forth that used to eat into a shop manager’s day. Once a candidate clears screening, they receive a text within seconds, and candidates pick their own time, often in under two minutes. A mobile Phenom Hiring Manager experience then lets managers review qualified applicants from the shop floor instead of a desktop.

The pace of that rollout can be credited to a decision made early in the process to prioritize different automations. Doing so allowed them to hit the ground running and set them up for success as they enter the adoption phase.

Dutch Bros even rebuilt the recruiter role itself, shifting that function toward talent marketing rather than staffing a traditional position. “They’ve been able to shift to higher impact activity to help fill the top of that funnel,” Buchanan said of the change.

What Results Come from Automating High-Volume, Frontline Hiring?

Although Dutch Bros is still in its adoption phase, the early hiring automation results within six months of going live were strong enough to headline the session.

Hiring manager CSAT scores improved 40% against the team’s pre-launch baseline, based on a survey Dutch Bros ran to gauge how shop leaders felt about their recruiting tools. Time to fill has already dropped 53% through automation, and Buchanan said the pace shows up on the ground too, with many candidates now hired and onboarded in under 10 days, down from 28, and a goal of reaching three. 

“No one wants to wait 28 days to hear news,” Buchanan emphasized. “The fact that we can get somebody hired and onboarded in less than 10 has just been really incredible.” 

Interview scheduling saw the sharpest jump of all, with automation cutting the time to schedule an interview by 95% and powering more than 10,000 completed interviews since Dutch Bros went live. 

Eligibility screening, covering criteria like age and work-hour availability, has already run across 30,000 applicants, and 88% came back qualified, meaning 12% were filtered out before ever reaching a shop manager’s dashboard. Buchanan explained that this matters in a decentralized model because managers “already know that the people that they are seeing in their dashboard are qualified for the position,” which cuts the mental load required to fill a role quickly.

Perhaps the most striking number is that Dutch Bros still hires all of its employees with a lean talent acquisition team. “We were very intentional and really thoughtful about the way that we designed automation so that we could keep our team size at nine people that could hire 25,000 people across the business,” Buchanan said.

What Comes Next When You’re Scaling Hiring at This Pace?

Adoption is the immediate focus. Buchanan wants shop managers using the new tools to feel supported, not just onboarded, and her team has already made quick adjustments based on feedback gathered since launch.

Next on the roadmap is a custom Broista Fit Score, built with Phenom, to help Dutch Bros identify candidates most likely to succeed in a role with few formal entry requirements. “We will start to set specific criteria around who our ideal broista candidate profile is and really make sure that we can use data to drive some of that talent to the doorstep,” Buchanan revealed.

Learn more about Phenom Fit Score 

Her advice for other frontline teams considering the same shift centers on relationships as much as ROI. Finding an executive partner who can champion the change matters, whether that’s a chief people officer or, in her case, a chief marketing officer who shares an interest in the 750,000 applicants who are also Dutch Bros customers. “It’s not just an HR project. It impacts every single team across the business,” she acknowledged.

For a company built on service through a window, Dutch Bros is proving that hiring can move at the same pace as the counter. What started as a scramble to keep up with new shop openings has become a system that finds, screens, and schedules talent before a manager ever has to ask for help, with 2,029 more shops still ahead.

See how Dutch Bros keeps hiring on the go with a mobile hiring manager experience