‍Making hiring happen while working from home

Local Splash is an SEO agency located in Fountain Valley, California. While known for being online experts, the agency’s office operations took place primarily in person. Until Covid-19 happened, and like many other businesses, the Local Splash team started working from home almost overnight, transitioning all departments to a remote environment. But as part of this move, the agency needed to rethink its functions, including hiring, which previously relied on in-person interviews.

Local Splash realized early-on that though the pandemic presented recruiting challenges, it also opened up opportunities. By becoming a fully remote organization, Local Splash now had the possibility of hiring candidates from anywhere in the world, rather than just the local area – provided the agency had the right tools in place. A representative of Local Splash, responsible for recruiting and training, set out to find solutions that would support this new reality and save his team time in the process.

They explained, “We looked at many different tools. We looked at chatbots to help automate and

different ATS systems to make things more efficient. After a lot of trial and error and many different attempts at testing different tools, I came across Wedge and set up a demo call. I explained to their team what we were looking for – and that was to save time.”

More streamlined screening

After that call, Local Splash decided to move forward with Wedge on a trial basis. From there, the agency got to see Wedge in action – and what it could do for their recruiting process. They shared, “In terms of our organization, we work at such a fast pace here. Most of our hiring processes take two to four weeks from the initial connection to offer to onboarding.”

During this period, the agency worked closely with Wedge to tailor the integration to meet Local Splash’s unique hiring approach. He soon realized that beyond the obvious time savings associated with video screening versus in-person interviews, Wedge saved time in other ways, too.

By asking candidates to record a Wedge, taking only five to ten minutes of their time, some opt-out, helping further refine the applicant pool. They said, “It’s reduced a lot of the fake applications and increased the number of committed applicants, which has been great. And with that, we saved time because now we’re not spending hours reviewing candidates that wouldn’t have worked out or candidates that didn’t have a genuine interest in our company. Because we work so quickly, Wedge enables us to filter out candidates before they even hit the hiring manager’s desk.”

Improved time to hire

Impressed by the trial, the agency decided to extend the engagement with Wedge for a full year, not only for the time it saved but also the solution’s straightforward user interface and its team’s responsiveness. And as the relationship with Wedge progressed, Local Splash continued to see results: the number of sales agents hired grew by some 20 percent in the last quarter and retention improved roughly 17 percent since implementation.  

They concluded, “At the end of the day, Wedge is what we were looking for: a tool that could save us time. We finally found a tool that we’re happy with.”