Excavating Contractor’s Small HR Team Greatly Expand Recruiting and Hiring With Arcoro

At Iowa-based contractor Elder Corporation, recruiting and onboarding were taking up too much time and too many resources.

Elder is an excavating contractor focusing on massive earthmoving projects, complex underground utility projects, demolition and other excavating projects. Elder first sought help from Arcoro in 2017 when they were facing staffing challenges thanks to a significant amount of growth.

Despite the large size of their projects, Elder remained a family business with a relatively small management team. They were struggling to meet the need for increased hiring without expanding their one-person HR team.

They decided to implement Arcoro’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS) when they saw how it would help them attract skilled employees with ease and assist them with keeping their multiple job sites adequately staffed.

Current Challenges

Four years after the successful implementation of Arcoro’s ATS, Elder Corporation HR Director, Jodi Allan, returned to Arcoro for help onboarding new hires. With help from the ATS, Allan was staffing many job sites, but needed help with these additional challenges:

  • Streamlining onboarding processes
  • Making onboarding easily accessible from multiple job sites
  • Enhancing the candidate/employee experience

Challenges

  • Very small HR team
  • Clunky paper processes
  • Employees spread out across multiple job sites

Results

  • Streamlined their hiring and onboarding processes
  • Reduced time to onboard new hires

Modules Used

Applicant Tracking System

Onboarding

"I found Arcoro’s Onboarding Module to be really intuitive and easy to use. And the feedback I’ve gotten from our candidates has been exceptional. They love it."

Jodi Allan, HR Director, Elder Corporation

Streamlining HR Processes

It was important for Allan to have a solution that would allow her to complete HR documentation efficiently and effectively. With Arcoro’s Onboarding module, Allan was able to automate the process and “paperwork” required to add a new employee. This left the team with more time for other tasks. “I found it surprisingly intuitive and easy to use,” Allan said.

Simplifying Onboarding

According to Allan, a growing company meant growing pains; especially when it came to onboarding. “We were doing everything manually so our new hires had to come in to our offices to complete a stack of paper. Then we would have to record the same information over and over from form to form,” Allan shared.

With employees spread out across job sites, the need to complete physical paperwork made the onboarding process inconvenient for workers and staff alike. However, after implementing the Onboarding Module, employees were able to quickly enter their information and finish their required paperwork from wherever they were in the field. There was no need for the HR staff to re-enter the data. Furthermore, candidate information from the Arcoro ATS module flows directly into the Onboarding module, so there is less information for new hires to enter during the onboarding process. “The integration was seamless,” Allan said.

Keeping Everyone Happy

For HR, creating a comfortable work environment keeps people engaged and productive. And it isn’t any different at Elder. Arcoro’s ATS and Onboarding Modules have allowed Elder to delight new hires with a pleasant, convenient experience right at the start of their employment.

“I’ve gotten amazing feedback from our candidates that see us as an innovative company in that regard,” Allan remarked. “And it’s just overall been good for us.”

Allan also said the HR team has been very happy with the customer service and support they were provided throughout the process. “My support questions have all been answered in a timely manner. It’s just been an overall wonderful experience for us,” said Allen.

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