Chipolte Customer Story

Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc., is a well-known restaurant chain specializing in Mexican food. Originating in the US, Chipotle now has 3,000 locations in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, and France. As this enterprise continues to expand and offer leading dining experiences to a growing global customer base, its headquarters has become a hub of technical innovation, operational efficiency, and customer services.

Employing almost 100,000 employees and serving approximately 750,000 people per day, Chipotle needed to scale their headquarters to offer the operational support required to maintain the quality of their services, food, and supply chains.

This included hiring across all levels from executive level, software engineers, customer care support, finance, general managers as well as hospitality crew for specific flagship restaurants. The quality of their well-known and popular brand needed to be upheld with every hire and used to facilitate every hire. However, their in-house recruitment teams were unable to support this scale of hiring and the complexity of their interdepartmental hiring needs.

Working with Chipotle’s existing hiring team, Pierpoint designed a dual approach to meet their recruiting needs. We deployed an on-site team to assess their current and future business needs and devise a strategy to meet their leadership, technical and operational hiring requirements. Taking full stock of their current situation and marrying it with their vision for where Chipotle wanted the company to go, our on-site team deployed a series of branded candidate outreach programs to source the right volume and quality of candidates for their leadership, IT and engineering, customer care, and finance and accounting roles.

A virtual Pierpoint team managed the candidate sourcing for their different restaurants’ hiring needs. This included local, state, and inter-state candidate sourcing for the manager and general restaurant crew positions. As Chipotle was rapidly expanding, Pierpoint needed to create a scalable recruitment and onboarding process to meet their growth goals.

Because of Chipotle’s extensive and complicated hiring needs – and the impact the new leaders would have on the entire company – Pierpoint focused on leveraging Chipotle’s popular and powerful brand to generate qualified and enthusiastic candidates.

By understanding Chipotle’s unique position in the market and the current state of the hospitality industry, Pierpoint’s teams were able to deliver the right volume of candidates required to meet their needs on the ground, and in HQ. The success of our initial partnership has led to ongoing RPO support for Chipotle spanning several years.

Project highlights for the 5+ year partnership include: