HRTechChat: How Yutaka Takagi and isolved Are Solving Hiring & Retention Challenges in QSRs

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As quick-service restaurants (QSRs) continue to adapt in a post-pandemic world, the challenges of managing a dynamic, high-turnover workforce have never been more complex.

In this episode of HRTechChat, 3Sixty Insights’ Geoff Webb sits down with Yutaka Takagi, Principal Product Evangelist at isolved, to explore the fast-paced world of QSRs and how human capital management technology is playing a pivotal role in workforce transformation.

With deep insight into the daily realities of QSR operators and managers, Yutaka shares how evolving employee expectations—especially among Gen Z—are reshaping hiring, scheduling, and engagement strategies. He explains how the speed and fluidity of the QSR environment demand not only flexible tools but also a shift in how organizations think about HR: from back-office admin to real-time frontline support.

From earned wage access and self-service scheduling to AI-driven hiring and always-on HR chatbots, isolved is helping QSR leaders streamline operations and improve the employee experience—without compromising on cost or efficiency.

What does it take to attract and retain Gen Z talent in a high-churn environment? How can technology reduce friction for managers and enhance engagement for hourly workers? And how are QSRs rethinking their tech stacks to support sustainable growth?

Tune in as Yutaka dives into the unique pressures of the QSR space, the power of automation in small physical workspaces, and how isolved is empowering employers to act fast—and smart—at every stage of the employee journey.

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Transcript:

Geoff Webb 00:00
Hey, hello everybody. This is Goeff Webb from 3Sixty Insights. And welcome to today’s HRTechChat Podcast. I’m joined today by the eminent and always entertaining Yutaka Takagi from isolved. And you talk a welcome, please. You know, would you take two minutes and just introduce yourself real quick, and then we’ll get rolling into what is a super fascinating topic. Yeah, thanks,

Yutaka Takagi 00:23
Geoff. I’m the principal product evangelist here at isolved, where I get to appear on podcasts like these and go to different events and talk with a lot of HR practitioners about what’s kind of going on in their world, in their in their in their domain, in their industry, and yeah, super happy to get this opportunity to chat with you today. Awesome, great.

Geoff Webb 00:48
Thank you for joining us. Really looking forward to today’s conversation, which is going to be about the world of qsrs, and what you’re seeing there, what’s happening in those world, in that world. And we’re going to cover a fair bit of ground, but I think probably the best place to start would be just to sort of maybe do a quick definition of what a QSR is, for those people that don’t know. Yeah,

Yutaka Takagi 01:10
QSR stands for quick service restaurants. It’s, it’s a segment of the restaurant and sort of food service vertical that that really, you know, we’ve certainly found a lot of our customers are in and one of the, one of the, you know, there’s a sort of number of reasons for that, but really, what QSR? What sort of differentiates QSR from sort of the full service restaurants you might be familiar with. Full service would be anywhere you go in, you get seated, and there’s, you know, someone brings out a menu, takes your order, right? That’s sort of a full service restaurant. Qsrs are going to be more of those counter service type, type of restaurants where the service is quick. Think you’re sort of your you know what we might traditionally call fast food chains and things of that nature. But those are, those are some businesses where really the movement around the business is fast. Movement around employment is fast, and that all kind of creates a really dynamic space for us to serve.

Geoff Webb 02:11
Yeah, absolutely got it. I love it. So, okay, so if I’m if I’m sitting at the table and someone’s taking my order, I’m probably not at the QSR. If I’m up for the counter and I’m making placing an order, then I may well be at a QSR. And, yeah, I know isolt has a lot of customers in that space, and so as a result, you get the opportunity to talk to a lot of those organizations, and you work with a bunch of them. And I’m curious, you know? I It’s never an easy space, right? The QSR world is always a, as you say, a fast moving and a tough space to be in. I feel like at the moment, they’re facing some pretty unique challenges in a whole bunch of areas. And I’m curious, what you know, what are you seeing? And really, how would you sort of summarize the challenges that you see your QSR customers facing right now?

Yutaka Takagi 02:55
Yeah, you know, the the industry is seeing, obviously, you know, big change in the in the pandemic, post pandemic world, you know, restaurant workers in the sort of service industry were deemed essential workers, and so they, they kind of had to write it out, while sort of the rest of us, sort of in the in the office jobs had, you know, we’re allowed to work remotely or work from home, things of that nature. And now what we’ve seen certainly was a big change in that industry, but staffing levels have actually gone back up to sort of pre pandemic norms. But one of the things that we’re seeing in the I think we hear a lot in the conversations between, say, the operator, the owner, operators of, say, a franchise, or a general manager of a store location for like corporate owner or franchise locations, is, is that? Is that a big change in the workforce, right? And really, it kind of goes back to the good old generational conversations that kind of crops up every couple of years. And so now it’s really Gen Z, right, the Gen Z workforce and, and how do they, I, you know, how do, how do managers motivate the Gen Z workforce is kind of a key component of the conversation we’re hearing. Yeah,

Geoff Webb 04:13
I that that is fascinating. And, yeah, I could totally see, actually, because my sense would be that we, you know, when we talk to qsrs, and certainly, I know when you do, you see a lot of the sort of the your typical employee, employees are probably on the younger side. They’re coming through, doing other things. They may well be, they may be full time. They may have a, you know, a part time job while they’re at school or college or and so on. And so as a result, you’re constantly sort of seeing a, I want to say, a younger and younger generation coming. Maybe it’s just me, because I’m getting old, and everybody looks young now, but that that sort of dynamic, and therefore motivation and sort of management of those employees remains a is always the challenge for any, any organization, any business, whatever, but I think especially acute for those and it’s not easy just to not easy just to throw money at this problem right cost is always. Is a very big factor. When we think about what goes on in the world of a QSR, they don’t have the margins to throw around, right? Yeah, you’re

Yutaka Takagi 05:07
absolutely right. It is a low margin business, and it’s a business you know, where you know a certain level for what we might consider, for what other industries would consider, enormously high turnover in their workforce is kind of the norm. And so, you know, a level of turnover, particularly if you have young workforce who are always sort of on the move, and geographically on the move, perhaps they haven’t established sort of the loyalties of, say, a full time job might afford them. So, you know, these, these managers would say, you know, sometimes you lose a person for, you know, a nickel an hour, right? Difference in their hourly wage Can, can result in losing a person. And so these are definitely, again, yeah, not just money, but really, you know, one of the motivating factors we hear from like the Gen Z workforce is, you know, they want to do work that’s, that’s, that’s interesting. They want to do work where they feel valued. And so I think there’s this, this question, and sometimes maybe a little bit of a disconnect between, say, a generation, perhaps our generation, who might be the owner, operator, General Manager of one of these locations, trying to motivate and connect with these Gen Z workers,

Geoff Webb 06:26
yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s a you nailed it, right? And I know when we talked about this in the past, when we’ve been doing some research with you and talking to some of the isol customers in this space too. You know it’s interesting that the expectations of the Gen Z workforce, or the younger workforce. You know that one presumes of Gen Z, there may even, at some point be Gen Alfred, some fairly soon, coming through, their expectations of what happens in the workplace, how they interact with their employer, even. And I think you made a great comment when we talked about this. You know, a couple of months ago, even their expectations of what the interview process and the hiring process is like is now different from how we may have seen that 10 or 20 years ago. And that’s that forces change right in the way that employers are managing their their employees.

Yutaka Takagi 07:21
Absolutely, you know, I mean, we think about, you know, this generation, you know, sort of the digital, digital natives. I think we put that term on so the generation earlier, even, right, the millennial generation. But really, now, truly mobile and social native generation where, you know, they expect to be able to do everything on their phone. Everything should be, you know, you know, there’s, there’s the whole you know, meme of that could have been a text message, that could have been email, right? These kinds of things. Forget email. They don’t open their emails. So, like, you know, everything’s going to be via text, whatever interactions can be done on a phone, right? So, yeah, if you think about an interview, if I’m not interviewing on site, you know, it should be via, via FaceTime chat. It should be via, you know, you know, a mobile, mobile interface that certainly the job application shouldn’t be a paper application. I’m going to ask you to come in and fill in the store. It should be something I could just access through, through, through the through the phone, or, you know, I get a text message with a link that takes me to the to the job application, perhaps, and then once they’re on board as well, right? Things like scheduling, things like, you know, managing their personal information. I mean, schedule is a really big component here, right? Again. Think of hourly workforce. They need either go to school part time, they go to work part time. How do they juggle that? Well, they juggle that through being able to flexibly manage their work schedule and to be able to say if I needed cash for a little weekend trip, be able to get an earned wage access UWA, quick, quick access to my to my wages before payday comes next Friday. I think these are all points of, I think flexibility, right? That really, really important to that workforce. Yeah,

Geoff Webb 09:10
and I that’s interesting. You take a thank you that I think what’s interesting there, as well as I and I hear you as you talking through that, you know that sounds like as a as the managers of these and the owners and the operators of these, these the quick service restaurants, there’s a lot of different things they’re having to deal with there. There’s a lot of different pressures, like they don’t have money to just throw it’s motivating people to your point, you can lose somebody over a tiny amount of extra cash that somebody else may be able to offer. At the same time as the expectations of employees coming in are very high. I want to be able to work this way. I think your point about scheduling, it also came through really clearly. That’s a real point of, you know, potential contention or friction if you can’t schedule properly or you’re not sure that you can manage your own schedule. So there’s a lot to deal with. There’s a lot of challenges. And. And also, I know some conversations we’ve had that you lose one or two employees that that immediately has a very quick effect on the customer experience too, right? Because the employees are, they’re right there with the customers, and perhaps much more so than in in a lot of other industries, too,

Yutaka Takagi 10:18
absolutely, right? I mean, you know, it’s not really, it’s this environment where, sort of, sort of like, unlike a full service restaurant, where there’s clearly people, sort of on the floor of the service area, and then you have the back of house folks who are managing the kitchen and some of the the operations, you know, in a in a quick serve environment, a lot of times it’s all sort of one in the same people moving from, say, the cook station, the fry station, and quickly bagging those, the foods and then be able to serve it right to the person, the customer who’s waiting. And so in that sort of an environment where space is limited, time is limited, because, again, part of the value proposition of a QSR quick serve restaurant is the speed of this is quick, right? Yes, exactly. So, so, you know, in that kind of an environment, you know the time and sort of headspace that the managers have to allocate to HR questions right of the staffing needs, the scheduling needs, the compliance requirements they have to meet like those are, those are all sort of competing, sort of in the head space and in literally the physical space of the restaurant. We actually commissioned an ethnographic study. We hired an ethnographer to go and look at and watch the operations of the some of these quick serve restaurants, and really sort of observe, like, where are the points of, sort of, to use your word, right there earlier, the points of friction that are taking place, particularly in that manager, employee relationship, because we all know that’s that’s really kind of that, even in that space, that relationship remains really critical to say, retention and employee sort of satisfaction, engagement and in, yeah, we really, you know, learned some of these, some of these opportunities, not everything that we really can directly influence as a human capital management provider, per se, but, but really to be able to understand what are those concerns that take place on the ground in a restaurant, you know? And a lot of those change. Those come down to, well, how do they manage the small time and small physical space to do all the things that that they need to do as a as an employer. Now

Geoff Webb 12:47
that’s interesting. Yeah, I’d love to see the results of that at some point too. So yeah, that sounds fascinating. You bring me very nicely, though, to the next point I really want to make the next question I want to ask you, which is, okay, again, there’s a lot to deal with. There’s a lot of pressures. There’s a, you know, the immediacy, the responsiveness, is all required in managing the team and being able to reflect how they want to work. It sounds pretty dire, right? So let’s hope that there’s some good answers coming out of this. So I like to start at a broad level, and I think just, you know, before we get into the specifics of I solved, and again, I solved, I know spends a lot of time and energy focused on on the challenges and solving the challenges of qsrs. Let’s just take a little bit of a step back and sort of think more broadly what, what is the sort of role of technology overall in helping organizations solve some of those challenges?

Yutaka Takagi 13:36
Yeah, you know, I mean, there’s some of the, you know, from a restaurant operation standpoint, a lot of these, these the, what they might call the sort of the back office functions, management of inventory, orders and and, you know, coupons and campaigns, all those things. Those things tend to be sort of mandated systems, if you will. Or if you’re a part of a larger franchise, for example, something that the sort of the corporate organization would say, Hey, this is part of the part of the package, so to speak. A lot of that is really to simplify the customer experience, right? A customer, you know, if you’re if you’re going to one of these chain restaurants, no matter where you are, I don’t care who the ownership of the restaurant is, I want to be able to go on the app and order on the app and it just goes to the location nearest me. But there’s the some of these functions that are left to each franchise, each location, perhaps, or each ownership group to decide. And so to be able to fit into that technology ecosystem is important. So certainly, one of the things that we’re working on are are, how do we make ourselves, as I solved in our tools that are interoperate with, say, the point of sale systems that that these these organizations use, yeah, that point of sale tends to be that point where employees are clocking in. For example, if there, if there are tips involved associated with that location, those tips get. Logged into the point of sales, and they have to flow through the w2 that’s going to be an isolve. So those are all like points of integration that we were certainly looking at, but from other parts of the technology we certainly see, or that we see the restaurants really focusing on today would be, you know, tools that might help these, these franchise organizations, or the corporate organizations be able to decide where they should expand to next, right? So understanding the demographics, the geographies and sort of pockets of of the market, so to speak, understand the market and and I help, I help them identify where those growth channels are going to be. Those are like areas. We definitely see these groups investing a lot of of their sort of technology dollars towards, yeah,

Geoff Webb 15:46
that makes perfect sense now. And that brings me again around to the sort of the very obvious point, which is, again, I saw works a lot, and spent a lot of time and energy focused on qsrs. So, so tell me a little bit about what isolves. Perspective is what, what are you doing when you work with a a QSR, and often, maybe sort of walk me through a little bit of the what that looks like. What’s the sort of the cycle of your engagement with a QSR? Where do you start and where do you try and bring them?

Yutaka Takagi 16:10
Yeah, you know, hiring is, is ever the challenge usrs. So that talent acquisition component of of the human capital management is, is one part where there’s, there’s definitely a lot of opportunity to be able to help, sort of that time to hire. And even for these sort of evergreen, sort of roles that, you know, again, they’re used to there being continuous churn. So they’re just going to put a put a requisition out there that’s sort of always open for a certain certain roles in their organization. And so being able to provide that sort of value through being able to, for example, you know, some of our AI tools that help organizations create the right type of job ad, right that is going to be attractive to the audience that they’re seeking, as well as candidate matching algorithms. You know, we’ve seen customers realize upwards of 40% faster time to hire. And you know, time to hire is only one component. Obviously, time to fit time to productivity being enormously important as well. But if we can craft the right add up front, attract the right candidates, get the match quickly, we can again, then get them to the floor and productive quicker, right? And so these are all things that are that are important to be able to get a person sort of on on on site and and productive on the lines, as quickly as possible. Another component is, is, like I said that that idea that, you know, HR, there isn’t physical space for HR, right, functions, right, and there isn’t necessarily time for a long, drawn out conversation about a new policy, etc. So we introduced a conversational virtual assistant called always on HR, so that that’s a interactive tool there in the ISO platform, where employees at their leisure have 24/7 access to to a chat bot, basically where policies, handbooks, those kinds of details can be uploaded, curated into a knowledge base. So just sort of natural language interaction, employees can say, hey, what kind of you know, what’s my vacation balance today? Or when’s my next pay date? These are questions that people can just ask into the chat bot, and we can serve up those answers directly to them on demand, right? So that they’re not taking that time on the floor between orders, asking their boss for some of these kinds of questions. They can do that on their own time, very, very quickly through the mobile app. So, you know, being able to sort of shorten some of those administrative tasks like hiring, onboarding, that’s one part, and then another part of the focus is the employee experience. How can we make that employee experience, simple, enjoyable, in a mode that is expected through their mobile phones, so that, so that you know that they get the questions answered, they get their pay when they want, right? Though, those kinds of all those kinds of little interactions that are that make up the inner employee experience for for these, for these workers in these QSR,

Geoff Webb 19:25
yeah, that’s interesting, yeah. And, you know, it’s interesting. You mentioned the theme there was actually consistently, it’s, it’s quicker and easier, right? So back to the sort of, it’s quick service. Everything has to be quicker. I think that the capacity to reduce, sort of finding the right employees and onboarding them and getting them productive by the extent to which you’ve been able to provably do. I think that’s incredibly powerful when I think about the the challenges of a QSR. And again, we go back to you lose you. Somebody could just walk off the job in the middle of the shift because they’ve they’ve seen a better offer somewhere else. That’s really painful the more you. Reduce the time it takes to get those people, and then, obviously, that’s massively important. It reduces the, you know, the impact of the business, but also your second point, which is then delivering that better, richer employee experience, answering questions more, you know, in an automated way, giving earned earn wage access earlier and easier doing it all through mobile. That much better, much more tailored employee experience helps to keep the people. So I think you’ve got, I love the fact that you’re, you know, as an organization, you’re working at sort of every aspect of this of let’s go find the right people. Let’s go bring the right people in, and let’s keep the right people. And that it’s no it’s no surprise that a lot of QSR turn to isold to help them solve exactly those sort of core problems you actually mentioned in there a couple of times, and I was so tempted to stop you in mid flow and ask you, but I decided not to, because you were covering some really good stuff. But you mentioned a couple of times where I’m going that sounds like what you’re talking about are things like generative AI and natural language processing. We are not allowed. I think it’s like a legal requirement. No one’s allowed to do a podcast on technology, unless you end up wrapping up with some conversation about AI at this point, and generative AI and NGL and so on. So let’s talk about a little bit about the role that you think AI is playing in those things that we talked about. And I think the second half of that question would be, let’s talk a little bit about isol’s perspective on where you’re seeing AI come into solving some of these challenges.

Yutaka Takagi 21:25
Yeah, I think, you know, one of the things that you know, we really think about for these AI tools, and certainly an area that we’re investing a lot into, but we really think about, Well, where can that AI really meaningfully add value to again, that sort of, if we think about that restaurant manager or the payroll administrator, or, you know, HR person, like, Where can we add value to that, to that day? You know, when we think about our our customers are generally going to be small, mid sized, sort of mid market kind of organizations, maybe upwards of a couple 1000 employees. These are not large, large enterprises with, you know, HR, massive HR staffs, right, engaged in, you know, creating a ton of benefits, content and engagement. Content we’re talking about, you know, a handful of people, maybe one person, who’s managing all these sort of hiring and decisions, etc. And so how can we really incrementally deliver value to person? And so, you know, we’re not, we’re not really sort of broadly, you know, bringing in sort of, oh, an agent this, and an agent that, you know, we want to say, Okay, well, what’s a what’s a particular use case where, for example, our studies show upwards of 50% of an HR person’s time is spent answering pretty repetitive questions. So, you know, what can we do to alleviate that, right? And that’s where always on HR, and that conversational virtual assistant really came into being is, is to really look at that particular, you know, statistic, and that sort of, that reality of what an HR person deals with, and in some cases, these restaurant managers are dealing with the front line managers deal with, and how can we alleviate some of those pressures so that they can put more focus on the customer experience, for example, or the more meaningful employee experience, rather than command and control of here’s the new policy. You got to read it PowerPoints to do it. Hey, you guys can do that on your own. If you have any questions, ask the chat bot and let that answer those questions for you, so that what little time I do have face to face with the employee can be spent on more meaningful conversations around recognition, around incentive, and those kinds of those kinds of team building exercises that a lot of these folks do. So you know, when we think about AI, we think about it more from that perspective, really, really understanding that end user and seeing, where can we add value. So when we think, sort of, you know, look to the future and say, how might we improve, you know, the employee experience. You know, what are some things that we can give to the employee so that when they’re say, going through a moment of decision. You know, you know they’re going through a Benefits Enrollment, for example. And how can we make that experience simpler by understanding a little bit more about who they are, understanding a little bit about what their life situation is, to then be able to offer up AI driven suggestions and recommendations on on what kind of benefits might be best for their situation. So again, looking at no grandiose proclamations here, how can we incrementally help the end users? That’s kind of what we’re looking at.

Geoff Webb 24:52
I love that too, by the because it’s grounded in just practical solving problems, rather than simply throwing AI at every. Thing, and sort of attempting to say that everything’s AI, I love the way that you’re using it in sort of every stage and every interaction in the right way, in a focused way, and in a way to solve the problem. I love it. That’s a great a great strategy. And I can see, you know, in the future, sort of more investment in that sort of approach, as you say, to to build out the employee experience. This has been outstanding. Thank you. I think there’s a lot of insight here around qsrs. I think a lot about what you see when you do these studies, when you look at what your customers are doing, and also, obviously, the great work that isolved is doing in helping those QSR solve those problems in a way that is cost effective and scalable, and all the other good stuff that you guys already do for everybody else. So want to say thank you so much for joining us. Takagi from isolved. My name is Geoff Webb. I’m contributing analyst at 3Sixty Insights, and this has been an HRTechChat. Thank you. Thanks, Geoff.

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