Five Guys Case Study
Five Guys Case Study
Five Guys has grown from a single family-owned restaurant into a globally recognised brand - while staying true to a simple philosophy; serve fresh food, done right, every time. Their focus is uncompromising quality, from never-frozen beef to hand-cut fries and made-to-order burgers.
With thousands of locations and team members across the world, Five Guys delivers a consistently premium experience built on operational excellence, transparency and customer choice. This brand has earned a fiercely loyal following and a reputation for doing the basics exceptionally well.
As Five Guys continues to expand internationally, the brand remains grounded in its founding values - quality ingredients, empowered teams, and putting the customer first - driving sustainable growth while protecting what makes the brand iconic.
The Challenge
As a global hospitality operator, Five Guys was hiring at significant scale across frontline restaurant roles to support ongoing growth. With high-volume hiring needs across multiple markets, maintaining a steady flow of quality candidates was critical.
As demand increased, the default response from existing channel partners was simply to increase spend. However, this is unsustainable. Five Guys needed to generate more hires from the same investment - without sacrificing speed or quality.
Compounding the challenge was a reliance on a narrow mix of recruitment channels. This limited reach, constrained optimisation opportunities, and made it increasingly difficult to unlock further efficiency gains as hiring volumes grew.
Without a more diversified, performance-driven approach, Five Guys risked rising costs, diminishing returns, and reduced flexibility in meeting frontline hiring demand at scale.
The Solution
In partnership with Joveo, we helped Five Guys rethink how hiring investment was deployed - without increasing overall spend. By introducing a programmatic recruitment approach, Five Guys moved beyond a narrow channel mix to a dynamically optimised strategy.
Programmatic technology unlocked access to a much broader range of talent sources, with budgets automatically redistributed in real time to the highest-performing channels. Instead of defaulting to higher spend, investment flowed where it delivered the greatest return.
This shift enabled Five Guys to generate more applicants and hires from the same budget, improving efficiency at scale while maintaining the speed and consistency required for high-volume frontline hiring.
Business Impact
Before working with Yoke, we had an ambition to strengthen our talent attraction strategy, but we were struggling with how best to achieve it. While we had thoughts about where our challenges were, Yoke’s approach really helped us to surface the issues and where we could better value from our budget/campaigns. They took the time to understand our business, our candidate journeys, and our hiring pressures, which meant we quickly came up with a strategy that worked for us.
We chose to work with Yoke because they offered something genuinely different. Their blend of data insights, programmatic expertise, and strategic guidance set them apart from typical media partners. From the outset, they positioned themselves not just as a supplier but as trusted experts aligned to our goals, not just our budget.
While programmatic media has been the primary driver of our results, the value we’ve received from Yoke goes far beyond that. Their ability to advise on broader Talent Attraction & strategy has given us a pathway to explore social media campaigns to add another branch to our attraction campaigns.
We have been pleased with the results, not only have we seen significant improvements in cost per hire and overall volumes, but there have been meaningful wider benefits too and some great work on the Employer Branding side of things. Our internal Talent Team have been freed up to focus on direct sourcing and strengthening stakeholder partnerships, candidate experience, along with growing our EVP.
What we’ve valued most about working with Yoke is the partnership. They operate with genuine care, open communication, and a collaborative approach that makes them feel like an extension of our team. They offer proactive insight, rapid response, and a real commitment to shared goals.
We would highly recommend Yoke to any organisation looking to elevate their talent attraction strategy, gain more value from their media investment, or move from reactive hiring to a more intelligent approach.
