Ranked consistently as one of FORTUNE™ Magazine’s “100 Best Places to Work For” annual list, Whole Foods Market (NASDAQ:WFMI) is the leading retailer of natural and organic foods. With 54,000 employees in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, Whole Foods Market is growing rapidly across its 275+ worldwide locations. This decentralized, high-volume recruiting environment led management to conclude that Whole Foods Market’s existing Applicant Tracking Solution was simply unable to support the organization’s growing global needs.

On the front-end, a long online application process resulted in an unfriendly candidate experience, and on the back-end, users felt the system was unable to support unique talent management programs across different regions. Without the right technology in place, store managers struggled to keep up with the high-volume of applications that came into their markets, and paper was still playing a large part in their daily activities. Management set out to find a solution that could accommodate their growing global operations and was flexible enough to meet the distinct needs of different regions within one system.

To start, Whole Foods Market piloted the iCIMS Talent Platform across a few U.S. regions, evaluating the system’s flexibility, ease-of-use, improvement of the candidate experience, and most importantly, iCIMS’ commitment to customer service. Wowed by iCIMS’ Support team and the Talent Platform, Whole Foods Market then implemented the system across all U.S., Canada, and U.K. locations. To optimize the candidate experience, Whole Foods also implemented a searchable, interactive map that candidates could click through to view available jobs by location. Distinct Career Centers with short applications were set up to effectively route and track candidates by location, while still providing management centralized access to all recruitment data. To support Whole Foods Market’s decentralized atmosphere, different worldwide locations are provided with unique views of the back-end system interface, allowing for different workflows and user experiences per region while maintaining all data within one core platform.

Since its initial roll-out of iCIMS’ Talent Platform, Whole Foods Market has seen significant improvements in its HR processes. Executives agree that leveraging iCIMS’ best practices and the system’s inherent scalability has provided Whole Foods Market with the perfect recipe for long-term talent management success!