The Unexpected Hiring Manager: A Tale of Food, Friends, and The Journey That Connects Them

The day starts like any other. 

Reaching for a hand-written grocery list and menu or sifting through barrels of fresh produce to find the perfect pairing.

At least, that’s how mornings used to start for Karie, a chef and operations leader at Friend That Cooks, an in-home personal chef service specializing in weekly meal preps, dinner parties, and cooking lessons.

Like any great dish, Hiring Manager, Karie Baima‘s journey from sorting through kitchen pantries and stacks of fresh produce to piles of applications was unexpected, improvised, and done entirely in her own way.

This is the story of Friend That Cooks’ journey to a simple, yet scalable hiring process.

Swapping Seasoning for Sourcing: Friend That Cooks’ Fast Growth

For more than a decade, Karie’s world revolved around the rhythm of kitchens, the sizzle of onions hitting hot oil, the careful balance of salt and acid, the satisfaction of a perfectly plated dish. 

She’d joined Friend That Cooks in 2014 as a chef, energized to create meals that brought families together around their own dinner tables.

But growing companies have a way of reshaping the best people within them.

As Friend That Cooks expanded from a small personal chef service to a thriving business serving clients across 25+ cities, Karie found herself naturally gravitating toward a new role.

She had a knack for translating the nuances of reading a client’s preferences, navigating unfamiliar kitchens, and maintaining the perfect balance of professionalism and warmth, which made clients feel comfortable inviting the Friend That Cooks team into their most personal spaces.

Then came the conversation that would change everything.

It was 2017, and the company was growing fast. With wait lists growing rapidly in nearly every city they serve, they needed someone to officially take over hiring.

“Somebody’s going to give me this shot, I’ll just say yes,” Karie recalls with characteristic directness.

It was perhaps the most honest career pivot in corporate — no grand vision, no 10+ year strategic roadmap come to fruition. Just a practical decision that felt like the next logical step for the organization.

Except nothing about it felt logical once she actually started.

“I don’t have a recruiting background. I didn’t go to school for this [business]. I’m a chef. Food is what’s on my mind all the time.”

Suddenly, the woman who could instinctively tell when a sauce needed more acid found herself staring at email threads, trying to decode the mysterious world of resumes and interview scheduling.

The skills that made her excellent in the kitchen didn’t exactly translate to the digital landscape of modern recruiting.

Not to mention, while Friend That Cooks’ growth was already well on its way pre-COVID, the pandemic had awakened even more people to the possibilities of this service, that having a personal chef wasn’t just for the ultra wealthy, that weekly meal prep could be both accessible and transformative.

So, Friend That Cooks needed Karie to figure it out. With 127 chefs now on the team and wait lists growing in nearly every market, the stakes couldn’t have been higher.

In a business where employees are quite literally the product, where every hire walks into someone’s home and becomes the face of the company, there was no room for recruiting mistakes.

The First Course: Diving Headfirst Into HR

The reality is, Friend That Cooks is packed with incredible chefs, not recruiters or operations specialists, which led to a patchwork sourcing and selection process that left Karie exhausted. 

As she recalled, the most laborious part of starting in her new role boiled down to:

• Scheduling interviews (only to be ghosted far too often)
• Leading HR strategy
• The overall organization of resume screening and phone interviews

One reason for this was the sheer volume of applicants the company was getting; suddenly, Friend That Cooks was receiving thousands of resumes.

And after learning a bit more about their business model, especially their strong motto on work/life balance for employee retention, we see why. 

In an industry infamous for its salty employment practices, Friend That Cooks turned the tables on what a life in food service could be by offering built-in work/life balance, strong benefits packages, career advancement opportunities, and creative freedom.

Needless to say, the applications came pouring in. 

But scheduling phone interviews was a nightmare. 

Even with basic scheduling tools, candidates would forget appointments, fail to answer when Karie called, or simply disappear entirely. 

“I’d set aside my own time for this interview, and then they wouldn’t answer. Super frustrating.”

For someone whose previous biggest scheduling challenge was coordinating multiple dishes to finish simultaneously, the complexity of human scheduling felt impossibly chaotic. 

Three Systems, Zero Sanity

But phone interviews weren’t her only headache. 

Every morning brought the same maddening ritual, and one far too many talent acquisition leaders are stuck in right now: 

1. Check Indeed for new applications. 
2. Manually copy candidate information into the company CRM. 
3. Create separate interview notes in Google Drive. 
4. Toggle back to Indeed to respond to candidates. 
5. Back to the CRM to update the status. 
6. Over to Google Drive to reference previous notes.

It felt like a hiring black hole – once you dove in, there was no getting out. 

“I was basically managing three systems,” Karie recalls. “Indeed, where I get most of my applicants, probably 98% of them. Plus, their profile on Google Drive was supposed to be separate and private and not accessible to the whole team. And then the automations we had set up through the CRM.”

Every task required multiple steps, multiple platforms, and multiple opportunities for something to slip through the cracks.

And things were slipping through the cracks. Constantly.

• Scheduling, rescheduling, and scheduling again — the never-ending “Are you free at this time?” calendar battle
• Remembering which candidates she had already interviewed (and which she hadn’t)
• Corresponding interview notes and ratings in various locations
• Where candidates were in the process and how long they’d be there

Behind every spreadsheet and every missed phone interview was a real need: finding the right people to walk into people’s homes, earn their trust, and create the kind of meals that would keep them coming back.

The chaos in the hiring process wasn’t just inefficient. It was standing between Karie and the thing she’d always been good at — connecting the right people with the right opportunities, one perfect match at a time.

A Light in the Hiring Darkness

By 2021, Karie had reached her breaking point with the phone interview marathon. The scheduling chaos, the no-shows, the constant back-and-forth — it was eating up entire days that could have been spent actually evaluating candidates.

That’s when she discovered a one-way video interview platform (not us) that seemed like it might solve at least part of her problem. Candidates could record responses to preset questions on their own time. No more scheduling. No more missed calls. No more “Are you available at 2 PM on Thursday?” email chains that stretched on for days.

It should have been perfect.

But the cracks started to show quickly. 

“I could tell just from the responses I was getting that applicants were having a lot of technical difficulties,” Karie remembers. “They would quit in the middle of it, or they were so nervous about whatever they were struggling with on the platform that their answers weren’t very good.”

She was trading one set of problems for another. The candidates who did complete their interviews often seemed frustrated by the experience, and frustrated candidates don’t showcase their best selves.

While researching alternatives, Karie’s team scheduled a demo with Spark Hire. From the first few minutes, she could tell this was different. The platform was intuitive, candidate-friendly, and designed by people who actually understood what it felt like to be on both sides of the interview process.

There was just one problem.

“I was really impressed with it, but it was out of our price range at the time,” she recalls.

So they stuck with the other tool, and Karie filed away her notes from that Spark Hire demo, the way you might save a recipe for a special occasion dish — something you know you want to make someday, when the timing is right.

The problems kept mounting. More frustrated candidates. More incomplete interviews. More time wasted on a solution that wasn’t really solving anything.

Finally, the frustration outweighed the budget constraints. She went back to her boss with those carefully preserved notes and made her case: they needed something that worked, even if it cost a bit more upfront.

Sometimes the best ingredients are worth the extra investment (truffles, saffron, you get the picture). 

By 2023, Friend That Cooks had made the switch to Spark Hire’s video interview platform. Almost immediately, Karie could see the difference. Candidates were completing their interviews. The technical glitches disappeared. Most importantly, she was getting authentic responses that actually helped her identify who belonged in someone’s kitchen and who didn’t.

“Phone call interviews were so redundant,” she reflects.

With one-way video interviews, candidates could take their time, record at a time that was best for them (even if that was 3 AM), think through their responses, and present their best selves. Karie could review interviews when it fit her schedule, compare candidates side by side, and make decisions based on substance rather than scheduling logistics.

It was her first taste of what hiring technology could be when it was designed for real people solving real problems.

But as she would soon discover, solving the interview problem was only the beginning.

The Second Course: Exploring Applicant Tracking Systems

Video interviews had solved the scheduling nightmare, but Karie was still drowning in the three-system shuffle.

It was around this time that Friend That Cooks had hired a new HR generalist — someone with a lot of hands-on recruiting experience who took one look at their patchwork hiring process and delivered the wake-up call that would change everything.

“She came from the outside and was shocked, ‘How do you guys not have an ATS?'” Karie recalls with a laugh.

An Applicant Tracking System – commonly referred to as an ATS. The kind of centralized platform that most companies take for granted, where candidate information lives in one place, communication happens seamlessly, and hiring managers don’t need a PhD in digital juggling to manage their pipeline.

“She said to me, ‘It does all these things for you. The things that you’re doing on all these separate platforms, it’s all in one place.'”

For Karie, it was like discovering that professional kitchens had been using food processors this whole time while she’d been chopping everything by hand.

Armed with this information — that an ATS could help with things like workflow automation and centralized communication — Karie and her team began researching options. They demoed several ATS platforms, each promising to solve their problems, each coming with its own learning curve and price tag.

But there was one obvious advantage to considering Spark Hire’s ATS solution: they were already using the video interview platform successfully. The integration would be seamless. The learning curve would be gentler. Everything could live under one roof.

“We actually did our initial demo with Adam Kazansky [Sr. Director of Commercial Revenue],” Karie remembers. “He was just really patient with all of our questions.”

For a team of chefs trying to navigate the complex world of hiring technology, patience wasn’t just nice to have — it was essential.

Even with a patient sales demo and the promise of consolidation, the prospect of implementing a full ATS felt overwhelming.

“It was really intimidating for me,” Karie admits. “There are so many little things you can do on an ATS that are super handy. But just for me to get the basics set up, it was difficult.”

This wasn’t just about learning new software. It was about fundamentally changing how she thought about hiring, moving from a collection of workarounds to an integrated system with workflows, automation, and features she didn’t even know existed yet.

Enter Sonia, Spark Hire’s Customer Success Manager, who would become Karie’s guide through the transformation.

What followed were weekly, then monthly, training sessions. Video walkthroughs. Email follow-ups. The kind of support that makes the difference between software that sits unused and software that transforms how your organization is hiring.

“It’s easy to play around on there and set up your view the way that you want it,” Karie discovered. “You can look at it from different panels or windows, which is really nice because I definitely have a way that I prefer to go through my steps.”

Slowly, the intimidating platform became familiar territory. The workflows started making sense. The automation began saving hours instead of creating confusion.

“I just love that it’s all in one spot,” she says simply. “Seeing their previous application, if they’ve applied before, all of that is just really nice to not have to toggle back and forth.”

Karie had found her groove.

How the Daily Routine Was Transformed with Spark Hire’s ATS, Recruit

For Karie and the team, the change was profound. The morning ritual that once involved checking three different systems, manually copying candidate data, and trying to remember where every candidate stood in the process had been replaced by something almost elegant in its simplicity.

Everything lived in one place now. Candidate communications, interview notes, status updates, and feedback from the team, all accessible with a few clicks. When someone applied for the second or third time, she could see their history instantly instead of trying to dig through old Google Drive files.

The woman who had once felt intimidated by hiring technology was now customizing dashboards to match how her brain worked, setting up automated workflows that made sense to her, and even helping train others on Recruit.

Dessert is Served: Still Growing, Always Optimizing

Even with all the progress, Karie maintains a healthy skepticism about automation, particularly when it comes to AI-powered resume screening. Her instincts as a chef, the need to personally taste, touch, and evaluate, carry over into her hiring philosophy.

It’s a perspective that speaks to something deeper about Friend That Cooks’ approach to hiring: the technology should serve the human judgment, not replace it — a philosophy we wholeheartedly share with Spark Hire AI.

In a business where every hire will walk into someone’s home and become the face of the company, there’s no substitute for careful candidate evaluation.

The (Winding) Path Ahead

As Friend That Cooks grows, Karie’s role continues to evolve. She’s no longer the unexpected hiring manager scrambling to keep up with demand. She’s become a strategic thinker about talent, someone who understands both the art of identifying great chefs and the science of systematic hiring.

“We need so many new chefs and I’m hiring in so many cities that it’s no longer a one-person job,” she reflects. 

The chef who once thought only about food now also thinks about talent pipelines, candidate experience, and scaling systems. But at her core, she’s still doing what she’s always done best: bringing the right ingredients together to create something special.

From creating individual meals to orchestrating a seamless and collaborative hiring system that helps dozens of chefs create thousands of meals for families across the country. 

The scale has changed, but the mission remains the same — connecting people through food, one perfect candidate (chef) at a time.