About the Company

Lessing’s Hospitality Group is comprised of over 100 locations throughout the Northeast and Florida – operating 20 wedding and catering venues, 19 full-service restaurants, 2 pop-up kitchen concepts, over 60 corporate and academic dining centers, and a historic inn. This case study is based on a March 2022 survey facilitated through TechValidate, a 3rd-party research service, and the responses from Billy Johnson, Director of Operations, and Mike Figuerado, Director of Operations, at Lessing’s Hospitality Group.

Bandwidth, Worker Quality, and Sourcing Challenges

Before partnering with Wonolo, Lessing’s Hospitality Group faced challenges with competition for quality workers, the time-consuming process of reviewing resumes and scheduling interviews, and workers not coming in for interviews that were scheduled. 

They were staffing jobs using local and national staffing agencies, however, they experienced additional obstacles with consistency, pricing, and complex processes for placement while using these services. Once workers were found, there was a lack of transparency into the workers accepting their jobs and scheduling issues. 

In addition to using traditional staffing agencies, Lessing’s Hospitality Group attempted to offset labor challenges by ramping up internal hiring efforts, including offering more flexible hours, attending job fairs, and using job platforms like Indeed. Ultimately, they reevaluated their labor strategy and selected Wonolo as their streamlined staffing solution.

Wonolo’s Impact

When choosing Wonolo as their staffing partner, the following key features and capabilities were most important to Lessing’s Hospitality Group:

• Ability to streamline the number of staffing partners used
• Reduced time to fill key operations jobs
• Solution of taking on the full-placement process
• Ability to adjust the number of jobs posted per day based on demand
• Scalable solution allowing various team members to manage job requests in multiple locations
• Ability to align with workers’ preference for flexible hours
• Support and customer service teams
• Help with optimizing job postings

During onboarding, the business was able to implement Wonolo with minimal operational disruption. Since then, they have seen increased staff productivity, reporting that Wonolo has impacted their operational KPIs by 50-75%.

Billy Johnson, Director of Operations, says that the best values of Wonolo have been “the reduced administrative effort to quickly and easily find workers to fill jobs, a scalable labor solution with easy access to reporting and job visibility, and alignment with worker preferences by leaning into flexibility.”

Another Director of Operations, Mike Figuerado, says “Wonolo helped alleviate the day-to-day task of sourcing workers, reviewing resumes, and evaluating the right workers.” They agree that “Wonolo saved time by taking on the full placement process and optimized job postings to get better workers.”

When asked what they like most about using Wonolo, the Lessing’s Hospitality Group directors said, “excellent level of customer service from the account management and support teams, ease of posting jobs, and the ability to adjust the number of workers needed up or down from day to day.” They also enjoy the “real-time visibility of fill rate and the high number of repeat workers returning to [their] jobs.”

How Does Wonolo Measure Up? 

After implementing Wonolo, Lessing’s Hospitality Group uses no other services. Wonolo is now their only staffing solution.

Compared to internal HR/sourcing efforts, they ranked Wonolo’s abilities:

• Performance: Significantly Better
• Ease of Use: Best In Class
• Reliability: Better
• Scalability: Better
• Cost Efficiency: Significantly Better

Compared to external/traditional staffing agencies, they ranked Wonolo’s abilities:

• Performance: Best In Class
• Ease of Use: Best In Class
• Reliability: Best In Class
• Scalability: Best In Class
• Cost Efficiency: Best In Class