Food industry disruptors, Sessions, reduce cost per hire with Teamtailor

We met with HR hero, Kelly Davis, Head of People at Sessions, to discuss what makes Sessions unique, nailing their employer brand, and reducing dependence on agencies.

Founded in 2019, Sessions provides hospitality entrepreneurs with spaces to develop and scale their food brands. Sessions are rebuilding the food ecosystem in the UK by championing the best talent in food and addressing structural barriers in the industry.

Kelly is Head of People for Sessions, looking after all things HR for the 'Record Label for Food'. Prior to her time at Sessions, Kelly worked in the hospitality industry specialising in Recruitment and Training across several companies including Eataly, Cote Brasserie and Prezzo.

How is Sessions disrupting the food industry?

The aim for Sessions has always been about doing something very different, taking decades and decades of hospitality in the UK and asking how things can be done even better. The people that founded and lead Sessions are already disruptors in the industry so when establishing the company, they had already looked at what works in the hospitality industry and what doesn't and discovering that happy medium.

Sessions is omni-channel, owning venues such as Shelter Hall, a food hall in Brighton, and a restaurant called Neighbourhood in Islington. Overall it's about introducing the best talent in the food industry to your neighbourhood, be that through our venues or through our delivery channels. We also work closely with our Food and Beverage partners across the UK to bring the best founder-led brands in the industry, ensuring as many people in the country has access to them.

For us, there is a huge amount of seasonality. As Shelter Hall is on Brighton beachfront, we need more than double the amount of staff in summer as we do in the winter so there will always be periods of heavy recruiting.

Nailing the employer brand

We've had to make sure our career site is engaging enough that it tells an exciting story about working at Sessions, particularly to those who haven't heard of us, before applying for that role. We're really able to showcase how exciting it is to work here and promote the benefits we have.

Our whole career site is through Teamtailor and I always thought I'd need Marketing to get involved with setting it up, but actually it's absolutely astonished me how easy it is to do it ourselves. I edit it all the time! It's so quick and easy to do ourselves and we can do it in literally seconds. It's been super important for us because we can link people to our career site and there's a lot more information on there about the type of roles that we hire for than probably anywhere else online.

First impressions of Teamtailor

I had a demo with Teamtailor and was pretty much in love with it from then on. There is so much that Teamtailor can do, which I've never seen another ATS do before.

One aspect that's really important to me and the leaders of this business is having things in place such as ethical recruitment practices encouraging diversity and Teamtailor supports this.

Reducing agency spend and cost per hire

I think certainly one thing that we've reduced is agency spend, as a result of Teamtailor. There's the agency portal on Teamtailor for when we do use agencies, which is very handy as I'm not required to keep updating every single agency for every vacancy. In this case, we simply add them to the job on Teamtailor and the agency will have all of the information there.

Incoming organic candidates are now looking more attractive than agency candidates because they don't have agencies chasing them. This means we are interviewing more organic candidates and I think for that reason it's definitely reduced our cost per hire.

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