How Openair Cinemas Builds Their National Event Workforce

“The great financial aspects of using Sidekicker is that it allowed us to eliminate a lot of the backend costs of our business. This included the time that myself and my other coworkers would spend every month interviewing, onboarding and scheduling.”

John Amrhein, Head of Openair Cinemas

Openair Cinemas is the quintessential nightlife event for film, hosting 12 events over 6 months, across Australia and New Zealand.

Business challenges

Each event requires 12-15 staff across multiple roles including bartenders, wait staff, brand ambassadors, labourers and office admin support. They often have 4 events running simultaneously and are hence rostering 60+ staff in one night.

Throughout the year this totals 200+ staff working over 3,000 shifts, presenting three major challenges:

1. Difficulty hiring and retaining staff

Due to the sporadic and seasonal nature of work at Openair Cinemas, casual staff churned quickly, leaving the Openair management team frequently short-staffed.

This led to resources constantly being allocated to recruitment–e.g. posting on job boards and in Facebook groups just days before events–rather than event delivery and customer experience.

As all staff needed to be qualified with multiple certifications including RSA’s and OH&S training, this added even more time and effort to the process.

2. Wasted resources on payroll admin

Openair Cinemas spent hours every week on payroll due to the complexities of paying a large number of casual staff under varying wages and employment frameworks.

3. Excessive time devoted to scheduling and managing staff

Having to schedule, notify and assign hundreds of staff at a time with manually via countless texts, emails and phone calls became extremely time-consuming and difficult to manage, let alone optimise.

“As a manager trying to get on top of all of this often resulted in hours spent at the end of our week on admin.”

Mike Donaghy, Site Manager

Sidekicker’s solution

Openair Cinemas now use Sidekicker to recruit, screen and pay all their casual event staff across Australia and New Zealand. They also use the Sidekicker platform to schedule, notify and manage their entire casual staffing operation, helping them have the right people working the right shifts.

In the 2018/19 event season, Sidekicker has so far facilitated 2,800+ shifts and 11,300+ hours of work at 12 sites across Australia and New Zealand.

The Impact

Openair Cinemas has:

Completely eliminated recruitment, screening, training and compliance/qualification checks–outsourcing all aspects of casual recruitment to Sidekicker.
Outsourced payroll and insurances–Sidekicker is now the Employer of Record for their casual staff, saving them hours every week in payroll administration.
Outsourced staff support to Sidekicker’s Customer Service team (including managing withdrawals and finding replacements)
Use the Sidekicker platform to seamlessly schedule and notify staff, saving management hours a week previously allocated to manual tasks.
Maintained the efficiency of hiring repeat casual staff by building private Talent Pools, that allow them to easily rehire staff. The average number of shifts per staff member is 7.
Maintained staff quality, rating Sidekicker’s staff an average of 4.99 out of 5 stars

“The great financial aspects of using Sidekicker is that it allowed us to eliminate a lot of the backend costs of our business. This included the time that myself and my other coworkers would spend every month interviewing, onboarding and scheduling. All of those things together add up to a large amount of money and time, greatly reducing our staffing needs internally.”

John Amrhein, Head of Openair Cinemas.