The Client
TruGreen ChemLawn is the largest lawn and landscape care company in the world. Headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee, it serves 3.5 million residential and commercial customers with lawn care, tree and shrub care, landscaping, consumer products, and International services.
TruGreen LandCare, is the largest and most comprehensive provider of landscape services in the country. The LandCare company began in 1998 when TruGreen acquired several premier landscape companies throughout the United States forming its Landscape Division. With the acquisition of LandCareUSA in 1999, this division became known as TruGreen LandCare, and now includes more than 175 local branches in 50 major metropolitan areas across the country.
TruGreen’s parent company, ServiceMaster, is a fortune 500 company with 29 consecutive years of growth in revenue and profits.
The Solution
Wonderlic PhonApp® is a customized telephone job questionnaire that maximizes the efficiency of the employee selection effort. TruGreen uses PhonApp to prescreen applicants, who answer a custom set of questions based on the job requirements over an automated 24 hour hotline. PhonApp eliminates the hassle of applicant phone calls, faxes and email resumés and puts managers in control of the recruiting process.
Wonderlic WebApp® is a customized Internet job questionnaire that maximizes the efficiency of TruGreen’s employee selection effort. Employees interested in pursuing a job at TruGreen can access a custom WebApp site where they can view job openings and descriptions for any TruGreen office. If they are interested applicants are required to complete an pre-qualifying online questionnaire, customized for each position and can either attach or build a resumé which is included with their submitted application.
Wonderlic integrates the candidate databases from both WebApp and PhonApp, standardizing TruGreen’s recruiting process and creating a single source for all applicant information.
PhonApp and WebApp Take the Chaos out of TruGreen Recruiting Process
Before Bob Phillips implemented Wonderlic’s PhonApp to pre-screen job applicants at several branch offices of TruGreen companies, Monday mornings could be pretty chaotic. Whenever there was a job opening, the branch manager would run an ad in the Sunday paper that included the main number for the office, says Phillips, the Chicago region people services manager who oversees 15 Chemlawn and three LandCare branch locations. “It was crazy. There could be 100 calls for a single position.”
Meanwhile, the person who answered the phones may or may not have known that an ad was running or who ran it, forcing them to spend their time tracking down the source of the ad while all other callers were left on hold, Phillips says. And when the right manager was located, he would be inundated with applicant calls when he had more pressing issues to attend to. To make matters worse, Phillips says, applicants were calling the same number that customers used, making it impossible to know which calls were most critical to take.
Fed up, Phillips agreed to join an internal recruiting committee three years ago, to rework the company’s recruiting process. The solution the committee found was Wonderlic PhonApp. Wonderlic’s automated phone system gives each manager a unique toll-free number that they place in every job ad. Instead of calling the main office, applicants can call the automated PhonApp number 24-hours a day to find out more information about the position and answer a set of pre-qualifying questions. “PhonApp gives managers complete control over the recruiting situation,” Phillips says. “Now they only talk to qualified applicants, and they do it when it’s convenient for them.”
To further organize the recruiting process, last year Phillips added Wonderlic’s WebApp as part of his group’s transformation to mostly Web-based recruiting. Now when managers at his branch offices post job ads at CareerBuilder.com, they include a link to a WebApp website that is customized for TruGreen job opportunities. At the site, applicants choose the branch location and job they are interested in to read about open positions. If they are interested in applying, applicants complete a pre-screen questionnaire that has been customized for each job, including information about their background, experience and salary requirements. They can also attach or build a resumé at the site.
“With WebApp, not only do we gather information from the pre-screening questions, we can see an applicant’s complete resumé before deciding whether to contact them,” Phillips says. “That’s information I would normally have gotten in a first interview.”
Today, the employment coordinators gather all applicant information from PhonApp and WebApp through a single Wonderlic Online online database and set interviews with the best candidates based on managers’ schedules. “WebApp is really incredible,” Phillips says. “There’s no more pressure on managers to handle applicant calls, and the caliber of individuals we are seeing is really impressive.”
WebApp and PhonApp have also given managers more time to deal with customers and reduced the number of interviews they have to conduct. For example, recently a regional manager advertised for an office manager at one of Phillip’s locations. “She didn’t have time to answer calls and interview the 100 people who applied,” he says. Instead, based on the WebApp questionnaire and resumés she narrowed the initial group to 50. She then sent them all a broadcast e-mail with more details about the position and asked if they were still interested. Of those, 30 responded. “Using WebApp, she boiled 100 applicants down to 30 without talking to anyone,” he says. “She loves it.”
And after some initial hesitation, most of his managers have embraced it as well. “They were resistant at first because they thought people wouldn’t want to talk to machines, but they don’t even think about it anymore,” he says. “They realize how much easier WebApp has made their jobs.”
