Breaking the Job Board Cycle: How Compass Group Transformed Their Career Site Into a Conversion Engine

Background

Company Overview

Compass Group, the largest food service company in the world, hires more than 150,000 people every year across brands like Chartwells, Eurest, Morrison, and Levy. Its workforce spans frontline roles like cashiers, cooks, warehouse associates, and drivers to specialized professionals like dietitians, brand managers, and cybersecurity specialists.

Operating as a family of brands rather than a single, unified identity has a trade-off: while Compass runs one of the most sophisticated hiring operations in the world, its employer brand isn’t always top of mind for job seekers. Like many large employers, Compass turned to job boards to fill the gap — a strategy that brought in application volume but not necessarily quality. Many candidates were unqualified, mismatched, or applying to dozens of employers simultaneously, resulting in high spend and low conversion to hires.

The Challenge

Scaling Hiring with a Flat Budget and Limited Resources

Compass needed a way to break the cycle of rising job board spend while improving both the volume and quality of applicants. The answer lay in a channel it already owned: its career site. But like most employers, Compass lacked the technology to fully capture and convert the high-intent traffic already visiting its site.

Most employers dramatically underuse their career site as a lever to reduce job board spend. Even with a modern site and simplified apply flow, they lack the ability to re-engage visitors at scale.

The Opportunity

Automated Conversion of High-Intent Leads

Compass was already using Paradox, a broad end-to-end hiring platform, to streamline its apply process and deliver a conversational experience across interview scheduling, follow-ups, offers, and onboarding.

But they turned to Dalia to focus on a different part of the funnel - to maximize career site visitor-to-application conversion — turning existing traffic into more applicants without increasing media spend. Together, the two technologies complement each other: Paradox automates the post-application process, while Dalia dramatically increases the number of qualified candidates applying from their career site.

The Results

4X Increase in Career Site Conversion

Compass proved that there’s massive untapped potential with its career site. Adding Dalia’s automated re-engagement to its existing tech stack delivered a 4X lift on top of an already strong baseline, unlocking qualified application volume that job boards can’t match.

Dalia gives Compass the ability to “turn the knob” on applicant flow from its own career site exactly where and when they need it. Instead of driving maximum volume everywhere, Compass strategically deploys Dalia to boost conversion in specific regions, role types, or timeframes where demand is highest.

The results speak for themselves:

Career Site Conversion (Unique Visitors → Completed Applications)

• Paradox only: 3%
  
  
• Paradox + Dalia: 11.7% (nearly 4X higher)

This increase translates directly into more qualified applicants — without additional job board spend.

The Impact

Reducing Dependence on Job Boards

Reducing Dependence on Job Boards

Applicants from Compass Group’s career site have a significantly higher app-to-offer rate than those from job boards like Indeed. That quality gap means increasing applications from the career site is a clear alternative to simply buying more traffic.

By maximizing its own career site conversion with Dalia, Compass has reduced spend on low-quality job board applicants and reinvested in higher-performing owned channels. This shift has helped Compass break free from the job board cycle and focus its budget and efforts on channels that directly lead to hires.

“With Dalia, we finally turned our career site into a meaningful source of qualified applicants and hires — and broke the job board dependency we thought was unavoidable.”

— Shay Johnson, VP of Strategic HR Partnerships