How Prêt À Manger attracted and retained more candidates with Tellent Recruitee

Prêt À Manger has been serving fresh, "done right" food to office workers, hungry commuters, and busy professionals since it opened its first shop in 1986. As the business grew, however, its recruitment process hadn't kept pace with the realities of high-volume, multi-site hiring.

The team wanted a simpler, more structured way to manage applications, support restaurant managers, and make better use of technology — while keeping recruiters firmly in control.

Here's how Tellent Recruitee helped Prêt À Manger modernize its hiring process with a centralized, traceable, AI-assisted approach.

Goals at a glance

• Replace paper CVs and disconnected tracking with a centralized, GDPR-compliant process
• Give restaurant managers an easier way to handle high-volume, multi-site hiring
• Use AI to speed up candidate pre-screening and contracting
• Support the company's inclusion and diversity goals with more structured recruiting
• Choose an ATS that genuinely fits Prêt À Manger's culture and day-to-day reality

The challenge: no tool built for hiring

Around 90% of Prêt À Manger's hiring is for frontline, multi-skilled restaurant roles. Historically, most candidates applied the old-fashioned way: walking into a restaurant and handing over a paper CV.

For restaurant managers, that meant handling a constant stream of applications alongside their day-to-day responsibilities. For the People team, it meant there was no centralized way to see where candidates were coming from, track their progress, or reliably document the process for GDPR compliance.

"Before Tellent Recruitee, it was hard to see where our applications were coming from — all in one click, on one interface."

Kenethe Agbeke

Recruitment and School Relations Manager at Prêt À Manger

The team needed a tool built for hiring, not a workaround.

The solution: an intuitive ATS, plus AI that keeps recruiters in control

Prêt À Manger didn't switch ATS platforms lightly. To get it right, the team worked with Neno, an HR communications and employer-branding agency, which guided them through the process: stepping back to assess the situation, clarifying needs, aligning teams internally, benchmarking the market, and testing solutions side by side.

That structured approach — and the market insight Neno brought to the table — helped Prêt À Manger's Talent Acquisition and Development team confirm that Tellent Recruitee was the right fit.

Two things stood out:

• Ease of use — steps that used to take a long time, like scheduling and coordinating with hiring managers, became far simpler.
• Cultural fit — the tool matched how Prêt À Manger actually works, day to day.

Since switching, the team has leaned most heavily on Tellent Recruitee's candidate pre-screening tools. The AI-assisted filter lets recruiters search for specific, targeted skills, saving meaningful time at two points in the process: upstream, during pre-screening, and downstream, at the contracting stage.

"Tellent Recruitee in one sentence: it's an intuitive, simple solution that's genuinely suited to our day-to-day operations."

Kenethe Agbeke

Recruitment and School Relations Manager at Prêt À Manger

Centralizing recruitment also gave Prêt À Manger better traceability of its hiring — supporting the company's inclusion and diversity goals along the way.

The result: fast adoption, without losing control

Switching ATS can feel daunting — costly in time, energy, and budget, and easy to put off. Prêt À Manger's experience suggests otherwise.

The recruitment team was fully up and running on Tellent Recruitee within two weeks. Training hiring managers took just 30 minutes.

"If I had to recommend a recruiting tool to another retail or restaurant company, I'd say Tellent Recruitee without hesitation — it's built for our needs, for multi-site operations, and for managers who don't have time to dedicate themselves fully to recruiting."

Valentina Mingione

Talent Acquisition and Development Manager at Prêt À Manger

Looking ahead

For Prêt À Manger, switching ATS proved less a risk and more a genuine lever for HR performance. Centralizing applications, using AI to surface the right skills, and choosing a tool that fits the company's culture helped the team work more efficiently, improve traceability, and strengthen its ability to attract candidates.

For any recruiter weighing the same decision, Prêt À Manger's experience points to three things worth getting right first: clarify your needs, involve your teams early to drive adoption, and choose a partner who can support the change for the long run.

"If I had to add one last thing, it would be to thank the Tellent Recruitee team — they delivered on their promise from day one, from the very first presentation. That's reassuring. I feel we've built a relationship of trust."

Valentina Mingione

Talent Acquisition and Development Manager at Prêt À Manger