You can go anywhere to get a burger or a bagel. What sets Hamra Enterprises apart from most restaurant franchisers, though, is their organization-wide commitment to culture. For the operator of 200+ Wendy’s, Noodles & Company, Panera Bread, and Caribou Coffee locations, employees aren’t just people who come in and flip patties or steam noodles — they’re key cogs in a culture of excellent service.
And finding the right people to scale that culture all starts with how Hamra hires.
Managers were spending too much time on administrative tasks.
To ensure that culture is consistently maintained, it’s important that restaurant managers be on the floor, interacting with employees and providing an excellent customer experience. But Hamra’s hiring process wasn’t optimized to make that happen.
“Just to schedule an interview, our managers use to log into a website, look at an application, pick up a telephone, and contact the candidate directly,” said Aaron Einhorn, Senior HR Business Partner at Hamra.
With the hiring burden falling on managers’ shoulders, they didn’t have time to actively engage with the people at their restaurants. This didn’t just make it harder to scale culture — it created a worse experience for employees, leading to a 144% turnover rate across restaurants. And to replace those employees, managers would have to spend more time manually sifting through applications and scheduling interviews, an effort that often went unrewarded.
“Candidates wouldn’t answer calls,” said Sonja Breuer, SVP of HR. “And then once they called back, our manager would be off, so we’d never connect the manager with the applicant.”
This administrative phone tag led restaurants to sport a 13 day time-to-hire. And since frontline applicants value speed in the hiring process above all else, Hamra’s restaurants would often be understaffed, which also adversely impacted the customer experience.
We saw Workday Paradox as an opportunity to lift time off the plates of our very busy managers.
Human Resources Manager
Step One: Automated interview scheduling.
To solve this challenge and take the administrative work off their managers’ plates, Hamra started with their biggest hiring bottleneck: interview scheduling. Hamra teamed up with Workday Paradox to implement Sam, an AI agent that schedules qualified restaurant employees for interviews.
When managers wanted to schedule an interview, Sam would text the applicant with open interview times based on manager availability. Once the applicant selected a time, Sam would place a calendar hold and notify the manager. And if someone needed to reschedule, Sam handled that process with zero human intervention.
Step Two: An AI-powered ATS.
After two years of initial success, Hamra wanted to increase their usage of AI in the hiring process. So they continued building on their partnership with Paradox and implemented Workday Paradox Conversational ATS.
Built for frontline managers, Workday Paradox Conversational ATS makes job management as easy as tapping a button. Managers can open and close roles right on their phone, and 90%+ of the subsequent hiring process is automated by Sam. When candidates want to apply for jobs, Sam screens for minimum qualifications through a few text messages. If they’re qualified, Sam schedules an interview. And after the interview, Sam makes onboarding simple: it’s all done right on candidates’ phones.
Since implementing Sam, Hamra franchises have seen their time-to-hire drop from 13 days to 4 days, ensuring restaurants are fully staffed.
Sam takes care of everything for us. Our managers and our applicants love it.
SVP of HR
How the combination of AI and human intuition solves hiring.
With Workday Paradox Conversational ATS, Hamra has modernized their hiring. But that doesn’t mean that they want to automate every step of the process.
“There are very human interactions that we embrace at Hamra and we want to keep in place in harmony with AI,” said Einhorn.
While Sam handles the screening, scheduling and onboarding of candidates, Hamra stresses that the actual decision-making still falls on managers’ shoulders. With less time worrying about administrative work, managers are able to focus on the actual interviews with candidates — and determine the best fits for their restaurants.