How TruGreen Reduced Its Time to Interview by 95% — Increasing Its Applicant Pool by 85%

One of the leading lawn care companies in the U.S. and Canada was losing 85% of its applicants to a lengthy application process until it integrated its applicant tracking system (ATS), Workday, with the Indeed platform.

Key takeaways:

• TruGreen’s use of disconnected systems created a long and confusing hiring journey.
• Indeed’s ATS Sync for Workday syncs TruGreen’s jobs and Screener Questions directly from Workday to Indeed and then sends applications and responses back into Workday.
• TruGreen reduced its hiring process from 2–3 weeks to 1–2 days.

As Talent Acquisition (TA) Operations Manager for the US at TrueGreen,one of the leading lawn care companies in the US and Canada, Veronica Caraballo knows the headache of an inefficient recruiting system. But with one change to the hiring process, Caraballo reported that TruGreen was able to reduce candidate drop-off by 85% and accelerate time to interview by up to 95%.

“Research indicates that the average employer uses 16 human resource tools,” says Dave Anderman, Indeed Senior Director of Product Marketing. But juggling several separate platforms amid recruitment can create a poor candidate experience that deters job seekers, as TruGreen experienced. When the company switched from a tedious process to an integration between applicant tracking system (ATS) Workday and Indeed, however, the benefits were immediate and exceeded expectations.

When an employer integrates its ATS with Indeed, its open job posts sync directly to the site and applications completed on Indeed flow back into the ATS. Here’s how TruGreen replaced the manual management of data with automation, freeing time and energy to invest where it matters—connecting with candidates.

In addition to Workday, Indeed recently enhanced its capabilities with other large ATSs. Learn more about integrations at the Employer Resource Centre and explore the 300+ partnerships available on the new Integrations Hub.

A long and winding hiring journey

TruGreen has approximately 314 branches across the US and Canada and a core team of 105 recruiters. Due to the seasonality of its hiring, that team can grow to 265 during peak periods. Recruiters cover up to 600 consistent job openings, many of which are high-volume opportunities like sales and customer care roles. 

TruGreen relies heavily on Indeed to deliver its required candidate volume, tapping the millions of active job seekers on the site each day. For candidates to move through the hiring funnel at TruGreen, though, their information must be in Workday.

Historically, the lack of connection between Indeed, the source of candidates, and Workday, the system to manage jobs and applicants, resulted in a clunky and inefficient process:

1. First, the recruiting team would manually copy jobs from Workday into Indeed.
2. Applications were parsed from Indeed into TruGreen’s candidate relationship management system (CRM), where recruiters assessed candidates.
3. Finally, to get promising applicants into Workday, recruiters would either manually transfer the data into the ATS or reach out to the candidate directly and ask them to complete another application via Workday.

In these cases, recruiters would often need to contact applicants several times via e-mail, text, and phone to get a response. Job seekers were understandably confused, assuming they were hearing back about an interview, not to complete another application.

This process took up to three weeks, causing some sought-after candidates to move on to other opportunities. In a survey by CRM company Bullhorn, 66% of candidates say they’ve given up on a promising opportunity because it took too long.¹

“We had 200 candidates come into our CRM for each requisition on a daily basis,” says Caraballo. “But by the time we filtered through and contacted them, only about 20 or 30 were moving over to actual applicants.”

To solve this inefficiency, TruGreen’s Indeed representative recommended integrating Workday with Indeed. They put the TruGreen TA leadership team in contact with other employers who had recently completed integrations and provided the recruiters with a test environment to learn how it would work. With this firsthand knowledge and experience, TruGreen gained the confidence to make the change.

Simplifying the application process

The transition took three weeks, including the testing period and two training sessions for supervisors and recruiters. “With the instructions Indeed provided, we were able to follow the steps to integrate the Indeed platform into Workday super easily,” Caraballo says.

The new, simplified solution looks like this:

1. TruGreen’s team posts jobs on Workday, and Indeed automatically syncs them to the site.
2. Job seekers easily apply on Indeed, and Indeed sends the applications to Workday, including responses to Screener Questions.
3. Recruiters identify which candidates fit their criteria within Workday and use Indeed Interview to schedule same-day or next-day virtual interviews.

Automatically syncing all jobs from Workday and receiving completed applications back eliminates hours of redundant work for TruGreen hiring supervisors. The enhanced capabilities with ATS Sync for Workday also help maintain data integrity that can be lost when manually transferring information.

video caption: Integrating your ATS with Indeed helps your team spend less time manually entering data or switching between hiring systems and more time connecting with job seekers.

With ATS Sync, TruGreen’s job postings achieve the same performance results they did when posted directly on Indeed. Indeed Apply allows candidates to send their resumes and other application materials in one click from the Indeed site. Employers who used Indeed Apply received five times more completed applications.² The TruGreen team also uses the feature to sync candidates who respond to its Indeed Hiring Events to its ATS.

“That was a game changer,” says Caraballo. “It used to take us a little bit over two to three weeks just to get someone to fill out the application, start interviewing them, and getting them into the background checks. Now, after using Indeed Apply Sync [for Workday], that process can be done within one to two days.”

Productive work allows for meaningful work

Since completing the integration, TruGreen has increased the speed of its recruitment process without sacrificing candidate quality. Candidates’ hiring stages sync from Workday to Indeed, helping improve the candidate quality matched with jobs on Indeed over time. Adding Screener Questions to integrated jobs also ensures a complete application—and jobs with Screener Questions are 50% more likely to result in a hire.³

“Along with a candidate’s application, their Screener Question responses sync from Indeed to Workday,” Caraballo says. “This helps our recruiters go through prescreened candidates and quickly determine if they should be moved forward.”

And this responsiveness is key, as 54% of candidates may withdraw from a recruitment process due to poor employer communication. In Indeed’s recent Ghosting in Hiring report, 25% of job seekers globally cited poor communication by the recruiter as a reason for ghosting.

Though sync capabilities vary by ATS, Indeed has worked with more than 300 global platforms to make integrating with your preferred systems as easy as possible. These include partners like Dayforce, ADP Workforce Now, iCIMS, UKG Pro, and Workable. 

“Indeed integrations drive efficiency and speed for both the job seeker and the employer,” says Anderman. “Recruiters can reduce the time spent entering data and spend more time making human connections.”

Find detailed information for over 300 ATSs on the Integrations Hub and connect with your Indeed representative to get started. ATS Sync for Workday and the Integrations Hub are currently available in the US, with more markets planned in the future.

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¹Bullhorn, Grid Talent Report, 2023

²Indeed data (worldwide), tracking on non-Indeed Apply applications may be limited

³Indeed data (worldwide), average over March–May 2023