Two years ago, El Toro started doing recruitment advertising for one of the two largest trucking companies in the U.S.
At first, it was a just small project, but as the Louisville-based adtech firm showed results, it accelerated, said CEO Stacy Griggs.
“They did a test between us, Google, Facebook, Indeed and Bing, and found that we were actually the lowest cost-per-hire of any of those platforms,” he said. “At that point, they really started to accelerate their spend to the point where they are a very substantial client today.”
Now, as employers grapple with a shortage of labor and competitive hiring environment following the coronavirus pandemic, recruitment advertising has become a significant portion of El Toro’s business model.
Griggs estimates it will make up 15% to 20% of the company’s revenue in 2022. He declined to reveal total revenue for the company.
“The Great Resignation, or the Great Reshuffling, has made talent and talent acquisition more difficult for just about every industry,” he said. “We’re talking with a large shipping company about helping them hire several thousand warehouse workers. We’ve got a large, out-of-state call center that we’re talking with to help them find 1,000 additional call center workers. We’ve got regional franchises for fast-food companies looking for workers.”
There were 11.3 million job openings in the U.S. in January, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, after an astounding number of people — 47.8 million — quit their jobs in 2021.
Kentucky had 160,000 job openings in January, and about 90,000 Kentuckians were unemployed, actively looking for work. Meanwhile, the commonwealth’s workforce participation rate was 57.8% in February, which was near the bottom in the U.S.
That complex labor market creates several unique challenges, said Cassandra Faurote, founder and CEO of Total Reward Solutions, an Indianapolis-based compensation consulting firm that does work in Louisville.
“The hiring environment is still stretched really, really thin,” she said. “I have people asking me all the time, ‘Where have all the workers gone?’ I don’t have a crystal ball and I’m not sure how long it’s going to take for it to get better.”
El Toro isn’t the only Louisville tech firm that’s found opportunity in that challenge.
“I would say within the last six months, we’ve just seen this massive inflection point of recruiters and HR departments, especially the innovative ones, becoming more open to experimentation,” Griggs said. “In this war for talent, recruiters and companies need to use every tool that they can.”
A new way of hiring
After more than two decades working in recruiting, Molley Ricketts dreamed of a tool that didn’t exist.
“I can’t believe no one has come up with an eHarmony or Match.com for recruiters — it’s a no brainer,” she thought.
She sat on the idea for a few years, but in 2020, the founder and CEO of Incipio Workforce Solutions set out to make her vision a reality. It was a risk to invest in new technology — and launch a second company — but it proved to be a fruitful endeavor as the pandemic gave way to the Great Resignation.
“While job openings have increased, the number of candidates for those potential opportunities has continued to decline,” Rickets said. “The selection of people choosing to work has also decreased. When you put those things together, it makes the staffing shortage that much more magnified.”
The new company, UnicusPar LLC, aims to match the right candidates with the right companies the first time without bias through its proprietary assessment and matching technology — saving employers time and money in the process. It launched its platform last summer, pairing companies with candidates based on the intersections of knowledge, skills and abilities, opportunities, culture and rewards structure, as well as communication styles.
Ricketts said since the launch, the number of qualified candidates for open positions has increased, which she considers a success.
Ron Stuart, owner of Lincoln, Illinois-based Stuart Solutions LLC, said UnicusPar’s assessments have lead to “superior cultural and functional fit” for hires within his organization. Additionally, he cited how easy it was to utilize the platform’s features.
“UnicusPar has a very appealing look and feel. It is fluid and intuitive to navigate,” Stuart said. “The pages are well laid out and easy on the eyes. These are features that are not currently provided by the most popular recruiting website, not to be named here.”
Since Jan. 1, UnicusPar has grown its applicant pool by 540% and it’s helped facilitate a couple hundred job offers thus far, sometimes up to dozens a day, said Weston Burchett, the company’s chief technology officer.
He said the biggest challenge is getting the company’s clients up to speed on how they can take full advantage of the platform.
“We’re bringing a new way of hiring,” he said. “It’s something that’s no one has ever seen before as far as a software goes. The process that you take, the questions that we ask, the way that we go about it — everything is in the system.”
A ‘game-changing’ partnership
While recruiting and hiring has been a challenge within and of itself, it’s been feeding into another, perhaps even more complicated issue: retention.
Through Incipio and UnicusPar, Ricketts and her teams have tried to alleviate turnover rates by finding the right fit for positions. But that’s where their engagement with that candidate ends — once they’re placed in the job, it’s up to the employer to provide and maintain a good workplace culture to keep them.
That’s where OrgVitals comes in. A spin-out of Unitonomy studio, OrgVitals was founded in 2021 by University of Louisville professor Brad Shuck, and co-CEOs Charley Miller and Kristina Rodriguez.
Ricketts and Shuck had worked together on several projects over the years, and that’s how she heard about the Louisville startup company.
“It’s a natural progression from recruitment,” Ricketts said. “You can attract top talent all day long, but if you’ve got a leadership team and a culture within an organization that isn’t great, those people aren’t going to stay.”
OrgVitals is working with more than 35 consultant groups from across the country, like Incipio Workforce Solutions, helping organizations figure out how to better care for their employees through culture data that offer actionable insights.
It’s also working with employers directly, and is currently in talks with a Fortune 50 company, in addition to other public and private entities.
Rodriguez said the startup believes the organizations that can continuously adapt to the needs of their people will outperform the competition not just now, but also into the future. The coronavirus pandemic kicked-off the first stage of a major workplace transformation, she continued, and the Great Resignation is only the beginning of the societal shift.
“In this new era of work, the biggest emphasis is on the human at the center of the performance model, whereas prior to Covid, you would go in and do your job and that’s it,” Rodriguez said. “You were just a hamster on a wheel, a cog in a machine, and the Great Resignation is really about people taking back their power and deciding on how and where to spend their energy while evaluating what truly makes them happy and fulfilled.”
OrgVitals can actually identify where work stress is concentrated and where there’s a high risk of turnover by layering the harvested culture data over a network map that visualizes an organization’s entire workforce.
It’s a proactive approach for recruiting, retaining and cultivating top talent, by creating a chance to intervene before productivity drops, someone quits, or the employer finds out what was wrong in a resignation letter or exit interview.
“We specifically focus on the social and emotional side of work, and we know that people that feel better work better,” Rodriguez said. “The predictive element is really important because oftentimes organizations hand down strategic initiatives and major plans from the top and there’s a disconnect in how those performing the role and driving these efforts on the frontlines are feeling.”
OrgVitals helps leaders keep an ear to the ground and will show them what will happen if a change is not made, through enriched data and predictive modeling.
Miller said OrgVitals recognized that companies didn’t just want another data dashboard or data visualizations — they want to know the next steps.
“What they really want is our actionable insights, where we hand over a sense of what’s going as macro conditions of the culture along with who specifically needs support, whether it’s an individual, a team or a demographic and what kind of support they need,” he said.
In the fourth quarter of last year, the teams from Incipio, UnicusPar, OrgVitals, and Nashville, Tennessee-based marking firm Grit & Gravel began working on a strategic partnership that would cover the lifecycle of workforce alignment, from talent attraction through retirement. The partnership was formally announced in February, offering not just the tech solutions, but the teams of experts to back them up.
“We’re building the tools and the collaborative efforts to allow leaders to put things like this technology in place to consistently deliver those results with speed and accuracy,” Ricketts said. “We want to completely change the way organizations and leaders grow their company. Being able to empower an individual, but then also showing the empowerment and the growth that comes from being on a great team is going to change the game.”
A growth opportunity
Kevin Shurn, owner of Elizabethtown, Kentucky-based Superior Maintenance Co., was introduced to El Toro years ago via his mentee, Demetrius Gray, founder of Captain.
But it wasn’t until last August that Shurn sought the company out for its IP targeting services.
In the challenging labor environment SMC had been struggling to staff its operations in Princeton, Indiana, where it employs 500 people on site at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Indiana.
“If you don't have folks coming to work and you don't have the people to fill the job that you need to run production, then that’s a big problem,” he said. “We run the risk of losing our business because we can't provide the people… these folks are team members, team leaders, group leaders, assistant managers, managers and senior managers.”
The company had been doing a lot of aggressive recruiting and boot-on-the-ground hiring efforts in addition to significantly increasing its wages, but it still needed more, Shurn said. El Toro stepped in, launching a recruiting campaign for SMC in September 2021.
“They allowed us the ability to target specific areas that we would not organically have access to, even though we were trying all these other things,” Shurn said. “That campaign accounted for about 15% of our new hires — that’s a huge number.”
Now, SMC has a surplus of staff at its Princeton operations, so much so that they are offering employees to other Toyota suppliers. The company, which employed 2,500 people last year, plans to utilize El Toro’s recruitment advertising campaigns for its facilities in Georgetown, Kentucky, and San Antonio, Texas.
“We expanded our thinking when it comes to recruiting and realized that there's not one activity that will solve our staffing needs,” Shurn said. “El Toro offers a new innovative approach to recruiting and it's proven to be a very valuable tool to us.”
After several years of scaling its team, El Toro is again investing in talent to support the growth of the new recruitment advertising business sector.
The company already has a robust data analytics team, Griggs said, but it will expand those positions, as well as positions for digital ad operators, software developers and sales and account management.
El Toro recently landed its first physician recruitment campaign after doing a fair amount of nurse recruitment. There’s not really a job or industry that this type of targeted advertising wouldn’t be beneficial for, unless it was a rare or highly specified position, like a medical physicist. Even then, Griggs is sure his team would find a way to reach those unique individuals.
“We hire a bunch of really smart analyst, programmers and account people and then that’s their job — solve for Y,” he said.
A CLOSER LOOK
El Toro
What it does: The IP targeting company, led by CEO Stacy Griggs, specializes in digital advertising technology, utilizing real human behavior to connect businesses and customers.
How it works: In one example, Griggs says El Toro used mobile location data to identify devices that frequented multiple truck stops like Loves, Pilot and Flying J’s. The company then put the trucking company’s recruitment ads in front of those individuals, that were very likely truck drivers.
Why it matters: Two years ago, recruitment advertising was just a fraction of El Toro’s business. In 2022, it will be between 15% and 20% as the Great Resignation has caused employers to seek out alternative solutions to reach talent in the competitive labor market.
UnicusPar
What it does: Founded in 2021, UnicusPar is a software company that matches the right candidates with the right companies its proprietary assessment and matching technology.
How it works: The company offers both company and candidate assessments to measure career compatibility, matching them using artificial intelligence.
Why it matters: It aims to save employers both time and money in the hiring process, in addition to increasing retention by finding the right fit for both the candidate and company.
OrgVitals
What it does: Led by co-CEOs Charley Miller and Kristina Rodriguez, OrgVitals provides data analysis and predictive insights to organizations and consultants leading organizational development and transformation as they prepare for the future of work.
How it works: Depending on an organization’s preference, OrgVitals collects identified or anonymous data via surveys. It then helps leaders learn from and lead with the data, identifying opportunities for growth and where there are weaknesses or other blind spots.
Why it matters: With access to timely data on how their staffers is feeling, employers will be able to take those actionable insights and ultimately retain their talent.
Two more questions with Cassandra Faurote, founder and CEO of Total Reward Solutions
Salaries and wages are going up across the board. Do you think that’s the biggest incentive employers are trying to offer?
It’s kind of a mix of things. I mean, we are seeing a number of large sign-on bonuses, especially in the tech industry — people are getting $30,000, $40,000 sign-on bonuses.
The larger tech companies, who’ve got more money in their pockets, are plucking people out of these smaller tech companies and doubling their salaries. Well, what are these smaller tech companies supposed to do to compete with that?
We’re seeing some retention bonuses, too, so if employers have really key people that they don’t want to lose, then they’re basically paying them to keep their buns in the seat, if you will.
The other thing we’re seeing that we haven’t seen for a long time is: It used to be if you went out and got another offer somewhere else, it was kind of like, “Good riddance.” Not now, because [employers] are realizing it costs them one-and-a-half to two times more to replace an employee. They’re giving out all these salary increases right and left not to lose people because they know how hard it is to get people in the door.
How can employers make sure their employees aren’t lured away by other companies?
Employee appreciation is really big right now — just making sure employees understand that you really do value and appreciate them. Sometimes that comes through simple notes, to letting them work on the kind of projects they want to work on.
We also see employers doing “stay” interviews … just having that honest conversation like, “Hey, how’s it going? What’s working? What’s not working? Do you think you’re going to be here in a year? Do you think you’re going to be here in three years? And without retaliation — you just have to have those open, honest conversations to gather that information.
And then, there’s what I call “meeting people where they are,” and understanding that people do have lives. Things happen and you’ve got to be flexible. Sometimes that means being flexible for more than two days.
But I’ve heard employees say before when employers have really taken care of them when they’ve had a tough time at home with some family situation or whatever, those are the ones that are more committed to that organization.
