How Jason's Deli Reduced Dependence on Indeed by Scaling Career Site Conversion

Background

Company Overview

Jason's Deli is a quick-service restaurant (QSR) operator with 170 locations across the U.S. and 4,700 employees, hiring approximately 2,500 frontline and management team members annually.

With constant hiring pressure, Jason's Deli relied heavily on job boards, primarily Indeed, to meet hiring goals. The strategy generated significant application volume, but most people were unqualified or unresponsive. Recruiters and restaurant managers spent hours combing through low-probability applicants, consuming valuable time and driving low efficiency.

The Challenge

High Volume, Low Quality

While job boards reliably produced scale, they also produced noise. Indeed delivered the highest volume of applicants—and the lowest percentage of hires. The majority of applicants were unresponsive or unqualified, creating bottlenecks at the top of the funnel and consuming valuable recruiter and hiring manager time.

Jason's Deli needed to improve applicant quality and reduce reliance on increasing job board spend to hit hiring targets.

“In 2025 we had almost a 70% increase in applicants—more than we've ever had in the history of the company. But the idea of shifting toward quality applicants, people who are already on our site, already interested, that's what made us think we needed to do something different.”

— Alex Cone, VP Talent Acquisition, Jason's Deli

The Opportunity

Converting High-Intent Career Site Visitors

Jason's Deli found an opportunity in a channel they already owned: their career site. Career site visitors demonstrated significantly higher intent, converting to hires at nearly 5.5x the rate of job board applicants. But while thousands of candidates visited the career site each month, only a small fraction completed an application.

Jason's Deli had an existing CRM tool, but without automation it required too much manual effort to make an impact at scale. To unlock this high-intent channel, Jason's Deli implemented Dalia on their career site to capture visitor interest and convert it into completed applications.

“People were coming to our site, putting in their name and phone number, and then nobody was reaching out to them. Dalia takes that on for us, and it's still branded as Jason's Deli.”

— Alex Cone, VP Talent Acquisition, Jason's Deli

They used Dalia to:

• Let visitors easily connect and share their information before leaving. 
• Surface matching jobs quickly
• Make it frictionless for candidates to apply on their phones
• Use text-first re-engagement to bring interested visitors back to complete their application
• Remember returning visitors so they didn't have to start over each time

The Results

2.6x Lift in Career Site Conversion

Without adding any new traffic, Dalia delivered a 2.6x lift in visitor-to-apply conversion on Jason's Deli's career site. That's 2.6x more applications without any increase in traffic.

The career site's share of total hires grew from 27% to 44%, and Jason's Deli's overall apply-to-hire rate increased by 34%, driven by more high-intent applicants coming from their career site.

The Impact

Eliminating Reliance on Job Boards

Jason's Deli reduced Indeed spend by 24% for high-volume hourly roles by investing in stronger career site conversion. Applicants from their career site were far more likely to be hired - requiring nearly 6x fewer applicants to produce the same number of hires as Indeed. With that performance gap, reallocating budget from job boards to their career site became an obvious choice.

As a result, recruiters spent far less time screening unqualified or unresponsive candidates, significantly reducing effort at the top of the funnel.