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Sport Clips, an 1850+ location hair care company, was struggling with an ordeal that plagues many retail businesses: understaffing.
The duty of hiring thousands of hair stylists every year fell on Sport Clips’ location managers, whose days were already busily spent behind the chair, serving clients. This left little time to hire the people necessary for the salons to run at optimal capacity. Without a dedicated, fast way to convert interested candidates into new stylists, Sport Clips was losing top talent to their competitors — and missing out on thousands of dollars in revenue.
Sport Clips decided to take action.
The organization implemented an AI assistant named Kenzie, atop Conversational Apply and Conversational Scheduling, to handle their pre-apply process. Now, Kenzie automatically screens and schedules qualified candidates in minutes — all over each candidate’s messaging app of choice.
You can register for the webinar below to learn about Sport Clips' full story.
Recently, Tim Sackett, president and CEO of hrutech.com, had a conversation with DeLisa Atkinson, director of TA at Sport Clips. In their chat, Atkinson was able to outline how Kenzie makes an impact, as well as how Sport Clips’ managers have adjusted to their interviews being scheduled automatically.
You can read a snippet of their conversation below:
Tim Sackett: A lot of people in your industry believe that finding a hairstylist is next to impossible. You even said that you thought it was harder to hire a stylist than it is a software engineer. But obviously you do need to hire that stylist. Staffing is critical — there’s a direct revenue line to it.
So talk about the speed difference before and after AI. How comparable is it, and how has it helped you staff better?
DeLisa Atkinson: Our goal is to contact our applicants within 15 minutes after they first reach out. Prior to Kenzie, we were nowhere close to 15 minutes; it was taking us hours. But since we've implemented Kenzie, it’s gotten so much faster. It’s now taking less than nine minutes on average to schedule a candidate for an interview.
TS: I mean, that’s so fast. Do candidates understand that they’re speaking to an AI? Because you would think there’s no way a human can work that quickly. What are the comments you're getting from candidates in terms of that — how fast Kenzie responds?
DA: Great question. Our candidates love Kenzie. They really think that she's a human being. They will say, "Thank you so much, Kenzie, I really appreciate it." They'll ask her additional questions. We've even had candidates go into the store and ask to talk to Kenzie.
TS: That's so interesting. It’s awesome to see that when you invest in great recruiting technology, your processes and results can really improve. But I’ve seen many TA leaders struggle to get their finance and operations people to understand, "Hey, we have to put this investment in to get better results.”
How did you create buy-in among your leaders to show that this would really provide ROI?
DA: It was actually very easy to convince our C-suite this was the direction we needed to go.
For one, they knew that speed matters. Candidates aren’t just applying to us — they're applying to so many other places. Response time is important. Whoever gets to them the fastest is going to win.
And also what we’ve found about our candidates is that they’re not applying Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., when recruiters are working, right? They're applying on weekends, and really late at night. Kenzie is now able to save us when managers aren’t able to pick up the phone and contact the candidates. And getting them scheduled increases our total pool of applicants, which helps increase our ROI.
We need stylists behind the chair to service our clients. The cost that each store pays for a year of Kenzie isn't even what it would cost us to not have one stylist behind the chair for one week.
TA: So every time an organization implements new technology, they always think the change management centers around the tech. You and I both know it's usually the people.
I want to hear the good and the bad. From that salon manager standpoint, what do they love about Kenzie and what were some of the challenges that you had to deal with? Because it's a big change to how managers do their work.
DA: 100%. I would say scheduling was probably the biggest change we had to deal with. Our managers are spending so much time behind the chair, cutting hair — but they also have to interview all these applicants that are coming in. There was an adjustment phase, we needed to really figure out that balance. How do we make sure that they’re behind the chair as much as possible while also interviewing the people they need to interview.
The cost that each store pays for a year of Kenzie isn't even what it would cost us to not have one stylist behind the chair for one week.
TS: With Kenzie, the scheduling happens automatically, behind-the-scenes in a way. There could be situations where managers all of a sudden think, "Oh my gosh, I have to cut five people’s hair, but Kenzie just scheduled me for an interview in an hour.”
How does Sport Clips avoid that situation?
DA: Most of our managers limited Kenzie to only scheduling interviews during certain blocks of the week. And some have even made it to where an applicant can only schedule an interview within a certain amount of days that they apply. Each manager can customize how Kenzie schedules candidates based on their own availability and flexibility.
Because we need to make sure that our managers can actually make the interview that Kenzie schedules.
TS: But the crazy part is that, beforehand, you probably had so many candidates that wouldn’t even get any interaction, right? Managers were too busy.
DA: Absolutely. 100% of our applicants now hear back from us, and that's just huge. From a candidate experience, it’s so much better to hear back and not fall into a black hole.
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