From first hire to first shift: How Chick-fil-A Orleans built a paperless HR foundation with Employment Hero

About the business

Chick-fil-A, Inc., Founder S. Truett Cathy started the business in 1946, when he and his brother, Ben, opened an Atlanta diner known as The Dwarf Grill (later renamed The Dwarf House®). Through the years, that restaurant prospered and led Cathy to further the success of his business. In 1967, Cathy founded and opened the first Chick-fil-A restaurant in Atlanta’s Greenbriar Shopping Center. Today, Chick-fil-A has the highest same-store sales and is the largest quick-service chicken restaurant chain in the United States based on annual system-wide sales. 

Chick-fil-A Orleans is one of the brand’s newest Canadian locations in Ontario. With over 100 team members joining the business at launch, it hit the ground running in every sense, including the way it manages its people.

Lynsey McMillan is the HR Manager at Chick-fil-A Orleans, responsible for the full scope of day-to-day people operations: onboarding, contracts, training documentation, employee records and team engagement. Like all Chick-fil-A locations, the Orleans restaurant is built around a culture of care, for guests and team members alike, and having the right HR infrastructure in place from the very beginning was central to that mission.

The challenge

Opening a new restaurant with 100+ team members is one of the most operationally demanding moments a hospitality operator will face. Before the doors open, every team member needs a contract signed, documentation filed, training records logged and onboarding completed — all at once, all correctly and all under the pressure of a hard launch date.

For Lynsey and owner-operator Natasha Vaux, the question was never whether they needed an HR platform. It was whether they could find one capable of handling a grand opening at scale while also laying the foundation for how the business would manage its people long-term. Manual processes, scattered documents and disconnected tools were not an option.

The specific challenges they needed to solve for included:

• Grand opening volume: Onboarding more than 100 employees simultaneously, with contracts, training documents and compliance records for each.
• Documentation integrity: Ensuring that every contract sent to a team member was accurate, up to date and ready to use — with no room for error in a high-stakes launch window.
• Long-term team management: Building HR processes from scratch that could flex with the business as the team grew and evolved, rather than bolting on systems retroactively.
• Employee engagement from the start: Motivating a brand-new team during the high-energy, high-pressure weeks of a restaurant opening — when culture needs to be built quickly and deliberately.

The solution

Chick-fil-A Orleans implemented Employment Hero before a single shift was worked. Rather than inheriting a patchwork of manual processes and retrofitting a platform later, owner-operator Natasha made the decision to build the restaurant’s HR function on Employment Hero from the ground up: a choice that would prove essential during the chaos of grand opening week.

“We were looking for a platform that could bring several of our HR and employee management processes together in one place. Employment Hero stood out because of its user-friendly platform, the range of features available and the ability to simplify and centralize our day-to-day HR administration. It was also recommended by other Chick-fil-A locations that utilize the platform.” – Lynsey McMillan, HR Manager, Chick-fil-A Orleans

Key features at the core of how Chick-fil-A Orleans operates today:

• Contract templates and digital document management: Lynsey has built out a library of templates for every contract type the restaurant uses — team member agreements, role transitions, training contracts and more. When a team member moves from one position to another, the right contract is ready to send in seconds, pre-populated and accurate. No second-guessing, no manual drafting.
• Centralized employee records: Every team member’s employment documents, certifications, ID records and role-specific information lives in one place. The entire team can access their own documents at any time through the Employment Hero app, eliminating the back-and-forth of paper trails and email attachments.
• Employee benefits and rewards: The platform’s built-in rewards feature has become one of the standout tools for the Orleans team. Managers can deliver Hero Points to employees for customer reviews, promotions, milestones and more — alongside a personalized message explaining exactly why they earned them. For a team that is brand new to the workforce and to each other, it has been a meaningful way to build culture and recognition from week one.
• Automated benefits triggers: Lynsey recently set up automated rewards for recurring moments (birthdays and promotions), so that recognition goes out without her needing to remember or manually action each one. It runs in the background while she stays focused on the floor.
• Mobile-first access for the whole team: Every team member downloaded the Employment Hero app as part of onboarding. Whether they need to review their contract, check a training document or see what their points can get them, it is all available in their pocket.

“The convenience of having everything on the application is extremely useful and time saving. Usually there is quite a long paper trail that comes with all this documentation — with Employment Hero, you don’t really have to worry about that.”

The wins

Chick-fil-A Orleans has been live on Employment Hero since before opening day, which means there is no ‘before’ to compare against. But that is, in itself, one of the most telling parts of the story: the platform was not brought in to fix a broken system. It was brought in to make sure a broken system never existed in the first place.

The wins for Lynsey and the Orleans team are less about hours reclaimed and more about the confidence and clarity that comes from having the right foundation.

• A grand opening without the chaos: 100+ team members onboarded, contracted and set up in the system before the restaurant opened its doors. Every document in place, every record filed, every team member connected to the platform from day one.
• Contracts that just work: Role transitions that would have otherwise required digging through files, manually drafting new agreements and chasing signatures now take minutes. Lynsey knows the template is correct before she even opens it.
• Recognition that runs itself: Automated rewards for birthdays and promotions mean the culture of care Chick-fil-A is known for is built into the platform’s infrastructure. A new team member receiving a personalized message alongside their first reward points does not need to know it was automated — it just feels like their employer is paying attention.
• A team that is growing into the platform: Several weeks in, team members are learning what their points can do, engaging with the app and building their own relationship with the platform. Lynsey sees that engagement only deepening over time.

“The efficiencies we’ve gained have allowed us to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time focusing on our team and the day-to-day operation of the business. Rather than needing additional administrative resources as we grow, we’ve been able to manage more of these processes within our existing team. Overall, Employment Hero has helped us streamline our HR processes and given us more time to focus on higher-value priorities.”

Why it matters

In hospitality, the opening weeks of a new restaurant set the tone for everything that follows. The team you build, the culture you create and the systems you put in place in those first frantic weeks become the baseline from which everything else grows.

For Chick-fil-A Orleans, Employment Hero was part of that foundation — not as a tool that solved an existing problem, but as the infrastructure that prevented those problems from arising at all. 

Lynsey did not have to manage paper files, chase down signatures or manually recognize a hundred new team members. She had a platform that handled it and the headspace to focus on what actually matters: the people.

When asked to describe Employment Hero in a single word, Lynsey did not hesitate.

“Convenience. Having everything on the application is extremely useful and time saving — and I’m sure in the future it will be saving the business money as well as time.”