Umamicart

An Asian grocery delivery business needed to hire quickly to keep up with customer demand. Strapped for time, the company’s co-founders partnered with Indeed to streamline their recruiting process and hire faster.

Background: A grocery delivery service bringing together different traditions

Based in Brooklyn, New York, Umamicart is an Asian-owned online grocery store delivering thousands of Asian products and ingredients right to customers’ doors — from veggies and fresh fruits to meat, pantry staples, rice, noodles and more.

Co-founder and CEO Andrea Xu is a first-generation, third-culture woman, born and raised in Spain to Chinese parents who immigrated there as adults. Co-founder Wendy Wang is also the daughter of Chinese immigrants. “Both Wendy and I went to school in New York,” explains Andrea. “And we had so many Asian-American friends that, just like ourselves, care so much about getting these flavors and foods but didn’t really have a great way to access them. One day, we decided this should change and we decided to build Umamicart.”

Umamicart is all about helping people celebrate their unique mix of traditions. They carry traditional staples and immigrant-owned heritage brands, but they also sell distinctly Asian-American products.

Challenge: Hiring fast enough to keep up with business growth

Andrea and Wendy started Umamicart in March 2021 to make Asian groceries more accessible during the pandemic. Many Asian grocery stores didn’t offer an online shopping experience, so Umamicart stepped in to fill the gap. But the business grew way faster than Andrea and Wendy expected. “Once we built out Umamicart and hit the ground running, we found that the demand was just immense,” says Wendy.

They started hiring their first few warehouse associates to help pick and pack orders. However, they quickly realized they couldn’t hire fast enough to keep up with demand while also juggling their other responsibilities. “Originally in the beginning, we were doing our own screening pretty manually — like calling each of them up, asking them a few questions…and that was just a huge bottleneck,” explains Wendy. “Like amongst the two of us, there’s no way we can do that with everything else that we also have going on.”

That’s when Andrea and Wendy turned to Indeed. “The practices that we were using of finding people one at a time started to really break,” says Andrea. “We really needed a platform that could help us consolidate everything, get organized and start getting smart about the way we were hiring.”

Solution: Flexible hiring tools to scale quickly

Indeed has helped take a lot of the time-consuming hiring tasks off Andrea and Wendy’s plates so they can focus more on connecting with great candidates and growing the business. Two Indeed features that help them the most are Sponsored Jobs and screener questions.

"[Sponsored Jobs] have been really, really important for us."

Andrea Xu, Co-Founder & CEO
Umamicart

Andrea says the flexibility and reach she gets through sponsoring is incredibly valuable since there’s a lot of seasonality that affects demand throughout the year. “Especially as a super young startup, sometimes the growth comes very different to what we projected,” explains Andrea. “Being able to turn [Sponsored Jobs] on as a feature and guarantee that we will be able to hit our volume, even if we mis-projected, has been really awesome for our team.”

You can sponsor your jobs on Indeed whenever you’d like, even if you originally posted them for free. Since there are no long-term contracts, you can also pause, close or re-open your Sponsored Jobs at any time.

Beyond sponsoring their jobs on Indeed, the Umamicart team also uses screener questions to automatically narrow down their applicant pool and prioritize outreach to high-quality candidates first. These short questions asked during the application process help employers identify which candidates meet their most important criteria upfront.

“Screening questions have really sped up our process,” says Wendy. “As a rapidly growing startup, we’re constantly hiring and growing our team and by adding these screening questions it’s really freed up our time.” Indeed data shows that jobs with screener questions are 50% more likely to result in a hire.^[1]

Results: 20+ new operations staff and a faster hiring process

So far, Andrea and Wendy have hired 20+ warehouse and business operations staff through Indeed. The best part? They never had to sacrifice quality when hiring at scale. Andrea and Wendy say Indeed has empowered them to build a diverse and committed team with features and tools that help them hire smarter.

“As a partner, we feel like Indeed truly listens to small businesses,” says Andrea.

Indeed compensated these small business professionals for sharing their Indeed hiring story.

Indeed helps businesses like Umamicart 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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