The Coffee Club's recipe for hiring success

The Coffee Club, Australia's largest homegrown café brand, has created memorable moments for over three decades. With 400 stores across 9 countries, they provide Good Food, Great Service, and Excellent Coffee, focusing on locally inspired dishes.

Their thoughtful franchising model ensures a warm and consistent customer experience, making them the go-to meeting place.

The challenge

Growing a café empire is no small feat. For The Coffee Club, with its plans to expand across Australia and internationally, one thing became clear early on: finding the right talent in the right locations was critical. But for franchisees juggling local hiring on top of everything else, this was proving tough.

And, with hundreds of stores, inconsistent hiring practices soon led to varied customer experiences—not the brand consistency they aimed for.

Here’s what was brewing in their recruitment process before they turned to Compono:

• Time-consuming manual hiring practices bogged teams down and diminished candidate engagement.
• Expensive job boards weren’t delivering quality applicants, driving up recruitment costs unnecessarily.
• Franchisee challenges in standardising hiring meant new team members didn’t always reflect the company’s brand or culture.

Nikki Ward, Group HR Manager at The Coffee Club, summed it up best when she said;

“Traditional recruitment processes are very manual, and it’s incredibly useful to have the candidate's insights upfront. We need to clearly understand what candidates are looking for and whether their traits or personality match the particular role and our company culture.”

What they needed wasn’t just a hiring solution. It was the right hiring solution. One that was efficient, scalable, and consistent across all locations, while empowering franchisees to align hires with their local needs.

The solution

To tackle these recruitment challenges, The Coffee Club worked with Compono’s Hire platform to turn their hiring struggles into a well-oiled, people-focused process.

Here’s how it all came together:

1. Job templates that tick every box
   HQ developed customisable job templates for essential roles like baristas and kitchen staff. These templates, built with evolving skills needs and cultural fit in mind, were shared across franchises, saving time and ensuring every hire reflected the brand’s values.
2. Hiring made simple, anywhere, anytime
   Through Compono's platform, both HQ and franchisees could post jobs, manage applicants, and track progress from their devices. Better yet, a shortlist of pre-screened candidates was ready when they opened the system, cutting hiring time by a huge margin.
3. A brighter, larger talent pool
   Walk-ins weren’t just customers anymore. Stores placed QR codes on counters that connected potential candidates straight to expressions of interest forms. Compono’s partnership with the Australian Retail Association (ARA), helped franchisees tap into a greater pool of qualified people.
4. Data that takes the guesswork out of hiring
   Hiring managers leaned on data insights from Compono to evaluate not just skills but also personality traits and culture alignment. No more gut-feeling hires that could go astray, informed decisions that added stability to the team.

Nikki Ward highlighted the difference this made, saying, “The talent pool is really critical for us, that’s why we continue to use the QR codes in-store. Hiring local is our aim, as we want to be the go-to Coffee Club for the people.”

The impact

By switching to Compono’s Hire, The Coffee Club achieved:

• Consistency across the board
  Hiring processes were standardised nationwide, creating a seamless candidate and on-brand customer experience across all 400 outlets.
• Speedier recruitment
  Thanks to instant matches from Compono’s talent pool, time-to-hire plummeted. Nikki shared, “I get a list of matched candidates immediately after creating a job requirement. One candidate accepted an invitation to apply within a day!”
• Cost-effective hiring
  Less reliance on expensive job boards meant reduced recruitment spend without sacrificing quality.
• Enhanced candidate engagement
  Managers had real data to go into interviews, driving meaningful conversations and memorable experiences for candidates.
• Paperless convenience
  A fully digital process meant franchisees stayed connected to hiring data anytime, anywhere, while HQ kept tabs on operations.
• Building stronger franchise-HQ collaboration
  Shared tools and insights built a better bridge between HQ and franchisees, giving everyone the support they needed to hire successfully.

Discover how Compono can help scale your hiring

The Coffee Club’s partnership with Compono shows what’s possible when you blend smart technology with people-first hiring practices. If your business is ready to revolutionise the way you recruit, visit compono.com today to learn more.