42%
more completed applications
“By implementing inploi’s technology we’ve been able to keep our existing HR systems in place and provide our prospective employees with an engaging experience that gives us full visibility of the process.”
Customer story · Restaurants
How wagamama cut cost per application by 63%
A Japanese-inspired restaurant chain planning ten new openings put its whole application on conversational apply, synced with Talos360, and moved its recruitment marketing onto job distribution.
The results
63%
£4.89
27%
The challenge
wagamama has served Japanese-inspired food at shared tables since 1992, and after a strong 2022 it planned at least ten new restaurant openings in 2023. Every opening is a hiring event, and the team knew that a better candidate experience and higher-quality applications were part of delivering the plan, not a nice-to-have beside it. The return on recruitment media spend had to improve at the same time: the openings could not be paid for with a bigger job-board bill.
Two things had to change together. The application had to be quick and recognisably wagamama on a phone, because that is where hospitality candidates apply. And the spend had to go where the vacancies were, with the team able to see what each pound produced.
What we built
Conversational apply now hosts the whole application. Jobs sync from Talos360, the ATS and system of record, onto the careers site; a candidate completes the full application in a conversation designed for their role type, and every completed application is written straight back into Talos360. The brand’s look and feel runs through every step, and the team gets a steady stream of complete, high-quality applications into the ATS without handling any of them by hand.
Job distribution replaced the manual media mix: campaigns find the right candidates across the channels that reach them, adjusted continuously against live performance. Analytics and attribution sit on top, in a dashboard built for wagamama that gives hiring managers full visibility and lets the team adjust in real time.
inploi also worked with Talos360 to bring post-application data out of the ATS on wagamama’s behalf. That closes the loop: cost per hire, time to offer and time to hire are tracked by role and location, so a bottleneck shows up before it becomes a problem.
What happened
Over the year wagamama took more than 23,000 applications at a cost per application of £4.89, 63% lower than the year before. Recruitment media spend fell 27% while the openings were staffed. Martin Wonham, Talent Acquisition Manager, described the pairing of targeted job distribution with a quick, on-brand application as what captured the best candidates, and both sides planned to keep going: a further reduction in media spend in 2024 alongside ten more openings.
In their words
They are almost an extension of our team. Their technology is market leading meaning our candidates get the best possible experience. I would really struggle to think of anything that I dislike about inploi.
inploi have become an invaluable partner to our talent acquisition team.
Martin Wonham, Talent Acquisition Manager, wagamama
jobs.wagamama.uk
“They are reaching talent pools we couldn’t reach on our own.”
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