Founded by cousins Jeff and Sam, King’s Seafood Company, Inc., formerly known as University Restaurant Group, has created successful Southern California restaurants including Water Grill, Ocean Ave Seafood, i.Cugini, 555 East, Lou & Mickey’s and the King’s Fish House establishments. The restaurants specialize in fresh crab, fish and other varieties of seafood that is sourced and delivered to each restaurant daily by their own distribution company, Kings Seafood Distribution. King’s Seafood Company has over 1,700 employees and 17 restaurants in California, Arizona and Nevada.

Using a paper-based hiring system presented challenges for King’s Seafood Company. As locations were added and employees hired, they needed a powerful and efficient HR solution that would improve the hiring process, save time, maintain accurate records for the busy HR Department and allow managers to interact with home office to share quality candidates among locations.

Visual Identity Group had recently launched the new King’s Fish House website (www.kingsfishhouse.com) and rolled-out a new fulfillment and distribution application for King’s Seafood Distribution. Management approached the team to develop a custom application that would streamline their HR hiring procedures and allow interested applicants to apply online. During the discovery process, Visual Identity Group researched and identified all of the independent methods King’s Seafood Company managers were using in their hiring, both from the restaurant perspective, as well as from the HR Department at home office. By understanding all the steps required from both business units, a custom application was designed that allowed candidates to apply online via the website and provided a feature-rich administrative area with an easy-to-use dashboard allowing managers to view and approve candidates through their proprietary hiring procedure.

Although King's Fish House has employed a new strategy for the Careers application, Visual Identity Group delivered a custom web-based application that gave King's Seafood Company the ability to automate each and every aspect of the hiring process for their 17 restaurant locations.

Features for the candidates included:

• Custom online application, created by management.
• Available in English and Spanish
• Ability to save and continue
• Ability to upload resume
• Ability to select by open positions
• Ability to select by location
• Ability to select by zip code
• Ability to select by manager or crew (hourly) positions
  

Features for the home-office HR and restaurant location Managers included:

• Web-based administration with robust dashboard and features
• Request home office approval to open a job requisition
• Ability to launch a new requisition and instantly have it reside on the consumer facing careers web page
• Schedule telephone appointments with candidates
• Share appointments with other managers to check on availability
• Move a candidate through a series of checkpoints including phone interview, face to face interview, evaluation and security checks
• Auto e-mail both candidate and appropriate managers every step of the hiring process
• Email marketing feature to contact current and past applicants
• Automatic placement of open requisition to job posting sites
• Robust reporting capabilities
• Manager’s meeting calendar
• Candidates sorted by name, proximity, education and skills
• Export applications for printing
• Share potential hires across locations to insure quality candidates are not lost in the shuffle
• Edit and Upload important documents for sharing and printing