Blue Star Donuts
"Using Indeed versus other platforms is like night and day."
Cami Justice, Director of HR
A gourmet donut shop needed to fill a variety of roles to keep up with business expansion. With only a one-person HR team, the company turned to Indeed to get back up after the pandemic and hire quickly across several new departments.
Background: A gourmet donut shop expanding into new areas
Founded in 2012, Blue Star Donuts is a small woman-owned chain of donut shops in Portland, Oregon and Los Angeles, California. With flavors like Blueberry Bourbon Basil, Chocolate Bergamot Old-Fashioned and Pear-Lavender Brûlée, Blue Star’s mission is to create unique and unforgettable donuts that celebrate the creativity and diversity in their local communities. As Cami Justice, Director of HR puts it “Blue Star creates delicious gourmet donuts for grown-ups.”
After bouncing back from the effects of the pandemic, Blue Star pivoted its business model to find new opportunities for growth. In addition to serving up donuts at existing storefronts, they started shipping donut bites nationwide and developed a wholesale partnership with local grocery stores so that their made-from-scratch donuts could be enjoyed by even more people.
Challenge: Filling multiple new roles as a one-person hiring team
Expanding into new business areas like shipping and wholesale meant Blue Star had to quickly ramp up new departments like warehousing, marketing, distribution driving and e-commerce. Cami, who was in charge of the recruitment process from end to end, struggled to find quality candidates for these crucial new roles. “We previously didn’t have a platform where we could find candidates for all those things,” she explains.
Before partnering with Indeed, Cami also faced other major hiring challenges like:
- A hiring process spread across multiple platforms
- Not enough time to review and respond to applicants
- Filling a range of roles across different job types, levels and departments
Like many people in charge of hiring at small businesses, she was facing these challenges alone. “When we started, I was a one-person team handling all the recruitment and hiring,” she says. “I had multiple platforms that I was using for recruitment, and it just got really messy, and very unorganized.”
Stretched thin and juggling many tasks at once, Cami turned to Indeed to save time, streamline the hiring process and connect with quality candidates who had the skills and qualifications Blue Start needed to grow.
"Having Indeed as one platform where it was all organized saved me a lot of time."
Cami Justice, Director of HR
Blue Star Donuts
Solution: Tools for quickly identifying top candidates
By using Indeed’s screening, evaluation and interviewing tools, Cami was able to automate parts of the hiring process and narrow down her applicant pool quickly and easily.
She started by using screener questions to automatically confirm key information upfront, like shift availability, without having to learn later on in the hiring process that there was a mismatch. This kind of transparency means jobs with screener questions are
Cami also used Indeed Assessments to get a better sense of candidates’ skills and experience. Indeed’s 200+ expertly designed skills tests help you evaluate on-the-job skills and qualities that matter most to your business. In fact, jobs that used Indeed Assessments made a hire
According to Cami, “The assessment feature can really gauge someone’s experience. On a resume, where someone could say they have five years of experience…going through the assessments, it really kind of tests that.”
Finally, Cami leveraged Indeed Interview to more quickly connect with top candidates and organize all communication in one place. “[Indeed Interview] has been very successful for Blue Star. So organized — the communication thread is all on the dashboard with that candidate. I find that it saves me time [and] the candidates’ time,” she says.
Results: More confident hiring decisions
Screener questions, assessments and virtual interviewing tools have made Cami more confident that she’s making the right hiring choices. With Indeed’s help, Blue Star has hired roles ranging from entry-level warehouse and customer service staff to general managers and high-level sales positions.
“The overwhelming response to Blue Star Donuts has been unbelievable. Indeed really allowed us to be able to find the great candidates that had the experience and qualifications to really help with our success.”
After suffering a significant blow due to the pandemic, including shutting down all of its retail shops in March 2020, to adapting to a new business model and building a winning team of 80+, Blue Star not only survived but is now thriving. Right now they’re expanding their wholesale and retail shop to LA and have future plans for other cities.
As Cami puts it: “Indeed really was able to help us ramp up, get our businesses up and running, and get back to where we needed to be.”
Indeed compensated this small business professional for sharing their Indeed hiring story.
Indeed helps businesses like Blue Star Donuts find the right candidates by providing tools that help employers manage hiring from start to finish — post your job, interview candidates and make offers all on Indeed.
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