Customer success stories

Cedar Fair

How one of the world’s leading theme park operators hires 47,000 seasonal workers annually.

Headquarters:
Sandusky, OH
Founded:
1983
Revenue:
$1.5B
Company size:
47,000
Industry:
Amusement parks
iCIMS products:
Candidate relationship management
Applicant tracking system
Text engagement

Cedar Fair is brilliant at making people happy – millions of people in fact. In one year, Cedar Fair entertained more than 26 million people at some of North America’s most popular amusement and water parks.

With just 2,000 full-time employees, Cedar Fair’s success hinges on its ability to carefully and efficiently hire more than 47,000 seasonal, part-time associates in order to deliver the company’s uniquely branded experience across 11 theme parks.

It’s a daunting challenge, made even more complex by the fact that about 90% of applicants are under the age of 30 and the majority are in high school and college.

Cedar fair employee securing people on a roller coaster

Cedar Fair's approach

Cedar Fair used to rely on a manual recruiting process – a complex web form that emailed submissions to an inbox reviewed by hiring managers.

Those limitations meant that Cedar Fair had no way to reengage the same hires year over year, a major obstacle since the company aims to rehire 35% of the previous year’s workforce.

With iCIMS, Cedar Fair overhauled its entire recruitment program and created a new employee value proposition to enhance its recruitment marketing ventures. The goal was to make the application easy to get talent through the door.

Now, over 180,000 people apply to Cedar Fair every year and its talent teams is routinely hitting seasonal staffing goals.

97%

completion rate on 180,000 applications

40%

candidate response rate to text communications

50%

faster application time

With the iCIMS Talent Cloud, Cedar Fair can:

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Cut down the number of questions on the application and drop the resume requirement, reducing the time to complete by nearly 50%. The organization’s application completion rate averages 97%.

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Make it easier to search for and apply to jobs on a mobile device in order to reach target candidates wherever they are.

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Keep former employees and new candidates warm throughout the off-season, and eventually get them to apply or reapply for the new season.

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Host and track ROI to make better event strategy decisions.

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Give recruiters access to text candidates directly throughout the hiring process.

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Launch text-to-apply campaigns across all parks with marketing materials like posters and murals. Candidates can now text “fun” to a short code and apply directly through text.

How do you possibly hire 47,000 people a year with no ATS? That’s hard to get your mind around. We knew we needed an ATS just to be normal and contemporary.

Corporate Talent Acquisition Manager, Cedar Fair

Using iCIMS to hit organizational KPIs

To ensure its parks open fully staffed, Cedar Fair adheres to four key hiring KPIs. The first is ensuring its parks are staffed before opening days – with benchmarks set at 60 days and 30 days. The team also tracks against maintaining a seven day time to offer, meaning candidates apply and are hired within seven business days. Because Cedar Fair sees significant new hires “ghost” their first day of work, recruiters work to ensure that 90% of all candidates are onboarded and show up for their first day of work. Lastly, Cedar Fair aims to have 35% of its seasonal hires return year over year.

However, keeping younger workers engaged during the gap between when they were hired and their first day of work is a challenge When a candidate is hired for a seasonal position, Cedar Fair uses iCIMS Candidate Relationship Management to nurture that new hire – with emails touching on everything from news at its parks to a to-do list. They monitor each new employee’s engagement with emails, and if they notice a drop off, recruiters use iCIMS to follow-up with text messages. As Cedar Fair’s Senior VP of Human Resources explained, “If they start to disengage, we’re going to recognize it and can do more to keep them from not showing up.”

Cedar Fair employee smiling in their amusement park

We needed recruiting technology that would modernize our approach to hiring a high-volume, seasonal workforce. With iCIMS, we’ve created efficiencies and improved candidate experience, which is incredibly important in today’s competitive labor market.

Senior VP of Human Resources, Cedar Fair

Learn how iCIMS can help you drive ROI

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