“I found this process to be so fulfilling, to be able to use my own ingenuity and my own love of learning to be able to build something that's actually helpful to our team. It’s been so much fun.”
Alexis Bovalino is the current HR Director for Burgatory and Shorty’s, two restaurant groups in the greater Pittsburgh area. As a teenager, Alexis joined the family business waiting tables until she left for college. When she graduated in 2019, she was eager to return to help build out the HR department and help with hiring across all nine locations. Alexis immediately realized the business was growing in complexity and would need software that could help streamline their manual hiring process.
Alexis says, “We were having a challenge hiring in our restaurants. So when I joined the team, I spent my first few months interviewing my restaurant managers to learn how we interview. From there, I worked with them to find pain points in their processes to help achieve a better process moving forward to reduce the time to hire, increase the number of candidates on those interviews, and effectively increase the number of people we were hiring. At the time, we didn't have a software solution or any cloud-based system to allow them to do that.”
Alexis started sketching out specs with pen and paper to find a solution. She explored Kanban boards and other project management tools like Trello with her team, but none were robust enough to manage their influx of candidate data. It dawned on Alexis that she would need a Google workspace to integrate with Google Sheets when she came across Glide. Glide’s ability to integrate seamlessly with spreadsheets, reporting, and form responses made it an attractive choice. From there, it was about designing the app and training the team on its use.
“Working with the restaurant team was really important to the design of this app. For example, one manager was really adamant about being able to see archived candidates so that if folks continually reapplied, we could see the interview data from prior responses without having to sort through our file folders. For me personally, it was really important to have access to reporting. All of these conversations were really important to the design of an app that made sense for us and our organization.”
Today, the company has expanded its use of Glide beyond an applicant tracking system to performance evaluation and managing payroll and employee data. The impact on the business has been profound.
Alexis shares, “This year, we’ve had 3,995 folks apply through the Glide app we built and made 727 hires. Before we had Glide, we relied solely on walk-in candidates for our hiring process. Today, over 94% are online applicants. That's a huge difference for us. Before using Glide, our management team worked in the restaurants alongside the crew. Because of our new hiring process and the number of candidates that we're able to acquire without spending too much time on outreach, we've effectively been able to get a lot of these guys out of the stores and into the positions that they were hired to do. New use cases for Glide crop up daily for Alexis. She works with her culinary manager on an inventory tracker to determine which equipment needs repair. “I am our HR person, but we now joke that I'm our HR/IT person.”
“We’re a team of people with a startup mentality. My father and the other owners came up with the idea, all of the branding, and everything that makes it special. To be able to play a part in that in my own way by bringing in an HR solution I created myself was such a beautiful moment.”