Recruiting During the Pandemic: Food4Heroes—230,000 Meals, 43 Hospitals, 12 Weeks

After delivering 300 nutritious meals in just four days, Food4Heroes wanted to expand nationally. Having spent time reviewing their organizational structure, infrastructure, and website, they knew that they needed to recruit senior regional directors to reach their goals.

To hire this top talent, the team recognized that using an applicant tracking system was their best chance at doing this quickly. 

Hours after reaching out to Talent Gleam, Food4Heroes knew they’d made the right decision. On the very same day, they had been set up with logins and shown how to use their new recruiting software.

After a couple of days, they’d successfully attracted and hired ten regional directors.

Due to the speed that Food4Heroes grew, it was very important that Talent Gleam cut time on recruitment admin, rather than adding to it. 

The HR team found Talent Gleam’s dashboard easy to use, and were thankful for one place to store all candidate information while trusting that personal data was protected. 

Once an application came through, the Food4Heroes team was immediately notified. Being able to communicate with the candidates directly through Talent Gleam saved time, and allowed other hiring managers to see where each applicant was in the recruitment process.

Despite the hiring team being small and incredibly busy, using Talent Gleam’s email automation and customizable templates ensured that each candidate had a great experience when dealing with the hiring team, and was kept up to date with where they were at within the recruitment process.

Even with a remote team, using Talent Gleam’s interview scheduling tool made it quick and easy to book interviews. By blocking out time in the candidate and hiring manager’s diaries automatically, there was no need for loads of emails back and forth.

In total, it took the HR team just a few days to attract and hire ten senior regional directors.

Food4Heroes was born at the beginning of the pandemic after reports that a nurse in Yorkshire wasn’t able to get food after a long 48-hour shift.

To support NHS staff throughout the pandemic, Food4Heroes wanted to make their idea of delivering sustainable, healthy meals to keyworkers nationwide. 

After reviewing their organizational structure, they turned to Talent Gleam for help recruiting ten experienced regional directors, who, in turn, would recruit hundreds of volunteers to achieve their goals.

An exceptional candidate experience was paramount for Food4Heroes to be able to attract the top regional directors that they were looking for.

Talent Gleam quickly set up a fully-branded careers site for Food4Heroes which included a simple application process for the candidate, outlining clear requirements for the regional director roles, including a series of qualifying questions. With just a click, the candidate could also apply with their Linkedin profile if they wished.

Within a couple of days, all ten regional directors had been hired. 

Once each regional director was in place, a regional team totaling 500 volunteers was built under them. And in two weeks, Food4Heroes had achieved its goal of providing 230,000 healthy, nutritious meals to NHS staff at 43 hospitals across the UK.