Storage is static. I mean, it’s supposed to be.
Storage — inherently, space — is valuable because it stays the same. It’s there when you need it, exactly how you left it. Dependable. Secure. Hopefully, roomy.
So it’s essentially the exact opposite of talent acquisition, which, for the last few years, has constantly been changing. Tech changed. Experiences changed. Expectations have changed… and if you don’t meet those expectations, you’re probably going to lose out on top talent.
At least, that’s what was happening to us at Extra Space Storage. Our process was slow, manual, and clunky — which might’ve been passable ten years ago, but not today. So we adapted to meet our candidates’ needs. Today, our hiring process is mostly automated through AI, with a few critical human touch points, and it’s greatly improved our ability to staff our facilities with top talent:
- We’ve dropped time to hire by 45%
- We’ve lowered 90-day turnover by 10%
- We’ve vastly improved our candidate experience
Here’s how we created a hiring process that’s as dependable as our space.
Extra Space Storage’s hiring goals.
Just because it’s self-storage doesn’t mean you can always do it alone. That’s why Extra Space facilities have onsite support. Which, admittedly, is rare in our industry. But we believe that our people are the differentiator between us and the competition. A 10x10 unit is the same wherever you go. But you won’t find people like ours in any other facility.
It’s why we focus on quality of hire above anything else: If we find the right people who make our customers happy, we can mostly promote from within. And have our company leaders be experienced, knowledgeable business drivers.
When your hiring process is slow, you’re not giving yourself the best chance to hire the best talent. You’re making it harder to capture that amazing candidate who will become a VP in five years.
Typically, those ideal candidates enter the storage industry from traditional customer-facing industries like retail or sales. But our old hiring process wasn’t set up to capture that market. Those candidates are looking to get hired easily. Quickly. It was taking us two weeks just to schedule an interview, which meant we often lost out to other companies who were moving faster.
When your hiring process is slow, you’re not giving yourself the best chance to hire the best talent. You’re making it harder to capture that amazing candidate who will become a VP in five years.
We knew that there was an opportunity to modernize our hiring process. Let me walk you through how we did it.
How our hiring process uses AI to propel the right candidates.
Here’s the magic of our hiring process: It’s holistic. From the first touchpoint to the interview getting scheduled, everything is done on one platform. On one URL. In one chat. Each step establishes momentum into the next step.
It starts with our career site. At this touchpoint, we want to emphasize education. Remember, our target candidate is usually coming from a different industry — we need to level set their expectations of what it’s like to work in storage. Our old career site was literally just an alphabetical list of jobs. You’d be hard-pressed to learn anything from that.
Now, our career site is education-first. With just two clicks, you can find which roles are perfect for you (based on experience or location), and watch a video that showcases a day in the life of that role. Do you have any further questions? Our AI assistant, Olivia, can answer them immediately.
Are you ready to apply? Olivia can handle that, too — you don’t even have to leave the page.
She’ll ask you some basic questions, and assuming you’re minimally qualified, send you a link to our assessment. Don’t be too scared by that word: assessment. All you have to do is spend two minutes looking at pictures and deciding whether you resonate with each one or not. It’s actually pretty engaging for candidates — and it’s helped us find best-fits easier, which means our locations are more frequently fully-staffed and we have to spend less resources filling roles.
After the assessment, Olivia will schedule you for an interview with one of our hiring managers. Because she’s synced with everyone’s calendars, our managers don’t have to lift a finger to get someone scheduled.
And that’s it. You’ve applied for a job.
Automation has made our hiring process better.
When candidates make it through the application process in minutes, you can hire in days versus weeks. And that often makes the difference between good and bad customer service.
With our holistic approach, we’ve reduced time to hire from 30 days to just under 17. That’s incredible. Time to hire, nearly cut in half, all while taking away a ton of work off our people’s plates. Now, they’re still involved in the process. They’re just focusing on high-value work: interviewing candidates and deciding who to hire.
A decision that our technology has made easier for them. Remember that assessment I was talking about? Candidate results are synthesized and matched up against our highest performing team members. So our hiring managers can spend more time with candidates that are likely to be great fits. And future leaders of the company.
That assessment — combined with more upfront education on our career site — has helped us lower 90-day turnover by 10%.
So we kind of have it all. Better hiring. Faster hiring. And hiring that’s more about selecting the right people versus simply staffing our facilities.
Our storage has always been dependable. Now, we have a hiring process to match.
