How KinderCare Learning Companies Quadrupled Applicants to Hires

The Challenge

KinderCare Learning Companies is the largest childcare education provider in the U.S., with more than 38,000 employees across their family of brands and more than 2,000 program locations in 40 states and Washington, D.C. But this wasn’t always the case.

In 2015, KinderCare was a fraction of the size it is today. Determined to carry out their mission to give children the very best start in life, the company entered a hyper-growth phase that required a critical element to build out their centers — people.

At the time, KinderCare’s corporate and management roles relied on direct sourcing to find applicants. That meant a recruiter had to hop on a job board — or even the phone — to comb through their networks for viable candidates, and generating interest in posted positions was difficult.

They needed better access to talent, higher quality talent pools, a way to reengage candidates, and a faster overall hiring process. A top priority was to replace the inefficiencies of managing two applicant tracking systems while performing manual data entry and job postings, and operating without a dedicated career site.

“We weren’t set up with the infrastructure to facilitate great talent data,” admits Travis Trautman, Senior Director, Talent Attraction & HRIS at KinderCare. As a result, “It took us 60+ days to get somebody through the whole hiring process,” he shared.

The Solution

Trautman’s requirements for revamping KinderCare’s TA strategy to scale the business and foster essential team agility included:

• Enhanced access to talent

• Increased efficiency with AI and automation

• An improved user experience for candidates and recruiters

To get there, they wanted a solution that could deliver a clean, user-friendly front-end experience capable of integrating with their current tech stack on the back end. They also needed a partner with robust product features and capabilities to scale support for a growing national company of KinderCare’s size and complexity. Phenom’s AI-powered Intelligent Talent Experience platform was just the solution KinderCare was looking for.

First, they implemented Phenom Career Site and Phenom CMS to establish a talent community and drive more traffic and applications with hyper-personalized search capabilities and content. In combination with the Phenom CRM, they can now nurture, track, and reengage their talent pipelines — a critical aspect of an efficient TA strategy.

Building on these components, the team began leveraging Phenom Campaigns and Phenom Events to create additional touchpoints with candidates through automated yet tailored email and SMS messaging — communicating details like hiring status, interview scheduling, and upcoming events. More recently, they began testing Phenom Chatbot to engage and hire candidates even faster with automated conversational recruiting.

The Results

As KinderCare continues to scale operations, Trautman marveled at their evolving partnership with Phenom. “We sensed immediately that Phenom had a strong commitment to transform, develop, and keep improving,” he said. “We knew we could grow alongside each other.”

And grow, they have. Within just two years, KinderCare’s conversion rate of applicants to hires has nearly quadrupled, reflecting not only more hires but better quality applicants.

Before partnering with Phenom, Trautman and his team had no way to nurture and communicate with candidates — whether about an open role, an upcoming hiring event, an incomplete assessment, etc. Now, they have a vibrant talent community with a growing subscriber base that they can easily campaign to.

Today, KinderCare reengages approximately 200K past candidates per year, and over 1M job seekers, leads, and candidates via automated nurture campaigns across the nation. This makes the Phenom CRM the “backbone” of success for the KinderCare team, according to Trautman — saving the TA team and hiring managers countless hours on manual tasks.

“We invest in generating quality leads and job seeker traffic. Phenom’s technology and partnership helps us maximize that investment and ensures we’re not paying for something we just set aside.” Ease of use is a big contributing factor. “Rolling out HR technology can be complex. But with Phenom, it’s simple. I love that about such a comprehensive solution,” noted Trautman.

In addition, being able to track how their efforts are performing through Phenom Talent Analytics — and adjust accordingly to stay in lockstep with their candidate pool — is invaluable to Trautman’s team, who can measure and monitor insights in real time to stay ahead of industry trends and narratives. Through data-driven messaging, KinderCare is appealing to the shifting needs of job seekers, meeting them where they’re at. Trautman believes that’s a big differentiator for his team over competitors — especially throughout a pandemic. And their apply conversion rates prove it — they’re two times higher than the industry average.

Trautman credits these stats to the “hiring machine” his team was able to create through Phenom: “Our signs of success are these continuous improvements. Last year, we hired over 27,000 people alone. We couldn’t have reached anywhere near that number if we hadn’t implemented these Phenom features.”

And what about their 60-day hiring rate? It’s been reduced to 21 days — a 65% decrease in time to fill.

The Future

What will be KinderCare’s ticket to success in the future? An even more seamless application experience for candidates is a top priority.

KinderCare is currently piloting Phenom’s hosted apply process which affords candidates the ability to fill out an application directly on the career site, instead of being kicked over to a separate site that requires another login and delivers a poor UX. Through it, Trautman’s team will be able to use the CRM to see exactly where in the application process candidates are and encourage them to finish in real time.

Trautman is also looking forward to the 24/7 engagement the chatbot will continue providing for applicants. “We’re trying to make a personal connection. The chatbot is a nice way for people to get questions answered and have more of a dialogue with an employer — even before they speak with a person. We’ve received great feedback, and it’s represented in the numbers.”