Case studies:
Ticketek
The client
Ticketek the leading ticketing partner to the sports and live entertainment industry and operates New Zealand's most advanced multi-channel ticket sales and distribution network.
Ticketek provides venues with an end-to-end ticketing and promotion service – from online sales, event delivery and frontline services to a dedicated team of call centre representatives and box office sales.
Ticketek New Zealand has been using Sidekicker as their event staff agency, recruiting events staff across the country - including Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Hamilton. Steve Prosser, the Head of Frontline Services at Ticketek describes the challenges they've had with casual labour hire.
The challenge
Operating in a highly seasonal industry, Ticketek experiences significant peaks and troughs in demand for their frontline workforce (i.e. call centre staff, box office staff, event day labour, and ticket scanning staff).
To manage this, Ticketek would run recruitment drives around the country 3-4 times per year, hiring dozens of casual staff at a time to scale up their workforce to cover peak periods.
"Our casual staffing operation would cause a lot of additional work during peak times. The process was a massive job for an already lean department – posting job ads, shortlisting candidates, interviewing, onboarding, preparing contracts, and then following up on paperwork – all just to get an employee set up. Not to mention the preparation of rosters, collation of timesheets and the weekly payroll process."
Unable to provide regular work during downturn periods, quality casuals would churn, requiring Ticketek to go through the entire process again when their next peak period approached.
The solution
Commencing to engage labour hire providers, Ticketek had 2 key concerns – cost and compromising staff quality. These were swiftly mitigated at Sidekicker in the following ways:
Saving time and money
Using Sidekicker for their casual labour hire, Ticketek appreciates the way everything is taken care of - from advertising jobs to interviewing, onboarding, and all the way to managing payroll. This saves Ticketek valuable time and money to spend on other important business operations.
"The ease of the platform also gives us flexibility, so we’re able to just get the right people in when we need them. The time saved on admin significantly outweighs the cost of Sidekicker."
Improving staff quality and retention
The fact you can choose your own staff on Sidekicker (compared to traditional labour hire agencies) using profiles with experience and bios mitigates any potential problems with quality or brand fit. And the ability to simply blacklist staff who don’t work well with our brand allows Ticketek to continually curate their workforce.
Ticketek appreciates being able to really own the relationship with their staff and rehire the best workers through their private Talent Pools. They also do not need to worry about losing talent during their quiet periods, as Sidekicks can seek other shifts when they're not needed at Ticketek.
"Our staff repetition has greatly increased, which means we save time training new staff when our regular Sidekicks can simply walk in the door and pick up the job on the day. We love it when we see familiar faces applying for jobs with us and are really proud of the fact that these staff are wanting to come back to work with us time and time again"
The results
Since February 2019 Sidekicker has provided Ticketek NZ with 100% of their casual frontline workforce. During this time the following has been achieved:
- Considerable time saved using Sidekicker to recruit and onboard new staff
- Time and financial savings with reduction of casual labour payroll and processing
- Improvement in staff quality
- Improved staff repetition & retention
- Fully engaged, well presented and happy casual employees who enjoy what they do
