Whataburger

Whataburger is a fast food burger chain. It started in Corpus Christi in 1950. And it is now in 16 states across the U.S. My name is Nicki Tafolla, and I am the Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition for Whataburger.

As with most companies, labor is always a concern, just the cost that it takes to attract talent is really high. And we work in an industry, in the restaurant industry, especially in quick service, that isn't always seen as a career opportunity. With Workday, the goal was to be able to attract the candidate and create an easy process for them to be able to be considered for the role.

Workday allows us to be able to build a platform to customize that experience for each candidate. So implementing Workday has allowed us to accelerate our hiring process, which is critically important when you're looking at the competitive landscape for hires. Prior to Workday, it could take us up to a week, in order to be able to onboard somebody, depending on what errors might possibly happen. With Workday, we're able to actually hire somebody and start them the same day, if we would like to. And they can begin training the same day, as well. And through their career, we're able to see their progression-- in skills and knowledge, and if they want to continue growing their career with us, we have the opportunities.

Since implementing Workday, in my role, I've seen improvements on the reporting side, so we're now able to report the actuals that are coming through the system. We're also able to see where we're seeing drop-off, so we're able to better assess that, and try to resolve it. We're able to look at each experience and say, "Is this really delivering what we want," for each type of profile of a candidate that may be coming through. We're also able to look at the processes that our hiring managers are experiencing, and improve those, based on the feedback that we're getting.

The partnership with KPMG to implement Workday is critical. KPMG was valuable in connecting us with other restaurant industry leaders that they'd worked with in the past to implement Workday. This really helped us with making sure that the build we were doing was the right one for us. We're growing fast, so KPMG was really a great partner in making sure that they understood what was capable right now within Workday, and what would be capable in the future.

The KPMG team was amazing to work with. They really set the stage for us at the beginning, and let us know what our experience was going to be. We had an accelerated implementation path, and they were very clear on what those steps were going to be to make it happen. Working with KPMG was an amazing experience.