Recruiting Tuscaloosa- My First Office

I was honored to become the Branch Manager in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Early in my management career, I knew the benefits of being able to create your own work environment. I looked at a few things that I didn't like about other work environments and promised to not let that be apart of my new office. I looked at somethings that I liked and added them to my office. My goal was to be happy when I went to work and happy when I left. I understood if I started hating coming to work everyday, my performance would drop. I always paid close attention to the energy we had in our office. I always had a great team. We knew if we had bad energy, the people coming into the office would sense it and it would create a bad taste in someone's mouth. Since we used word of mouth for recruiting, we always treated everyone great. We always ways kept a clean office. Our restrooms were always clean and available to anyone.

I focused on hiring employees that would help me reach my goals of growing the office, instead of skill sets of staffing specialist or work history from resumes. I didn't hire a single employee who had staffing experience. Out of the 4 employees working inside the office, only one of them was born in Tuscaloosa. Two of us came from other states. I hired personalities. I still believe this, if you find the right person who is willing to learn, their the best choice. My employees made up for the weaknesses I had. This concept made our team unstoppable. I never pushed them to hard, since our office was complete as far as our overall team skills, we never lost when I took time to train them. We met once a day in the morning, most of the days we met before we left. We followed a office board, I learned this concept in Columbus, Ohio. The board included open positions and candidates available.

Making Office Space

The first thing I remember, taking all of the supplies and placing them on the tables in the offices. I pulled supplies from every location I found them. Once I located all of the supplies in the office, I inventoried each piece. I rearranged our storage room to place all of our supplies in one location. I labeled each shelf to make it easier to find. I eliminated making bad purchases from the beginning, I always paid close attention to our budget, our bonus was attached to it.

I took another storage area in the office and relocated all of our PPE and our BelFlex T-Shirts. We took the T-Shirts out of the boxes they came in, lined them on selves to make it appear as a clothing store. Creating this space gave us the opportunity to store more T-shirts for our employees. We labeled the shirts by size and it made it easier to pass them out and keep inventory. While in Alabama, I designed two more BelFlex shirts that we added to our room. We never ran out of T-Shirts, at one point we gave shirts to other BelFlex offices who needed some. We used the rest of the space to store our bigger items. I turned our middle room into a sitting area for my employees to sit so they didn't have to sit in their cars to eat lunch. I moved the office microwave into that location and I got rid of the small college style refrigerator and bought a bigger refrigerator so everyone in the office could place their lunch inside. I bought a cheaper refrigerator, I spent hours cleaning the refrigerator until it was spotless.

I ordered water for the office. I always needed a drink of water before I interviewed so I made sure the candidates who came into the office had that same option. The water dispenser was a great addition, I liked it better than the water bottles. For one, its cheaper and it allows anyone to drink as much water as they want. It also creates the feeling to take as you please. I moved the water to front of the office so they could grab the water as soon as they entered the office. I eliminated them having to ask for a cup of water. We ordered candy for everyone who came into our office to interview. Since having candy was my favorite thing, I always made sure we always had candy. We always ordered good candy, that people would want. We had the candy I liked. We placed the candy at the desk as soon as you came in. Everyone was encourage to grab a piece. In the back by the sitting area I created, I kept snacks for our employees. Every time I bought donuts for my clients, I always bought a box back for my employees. At anytime a candidate could walk into the back of the office and grab a snack, donuts, coffee or candy. We took time out of our day to make our candidates fresh coffee if they requested some. I encouraged the office to give away things. I led by example, we had coloring books for children if they came. We ordered footballs and basketballs with the BelFlex Logo and I would throw them to people in the office.

I'm big on spacing and I made sure our office had a great flow. Spacing can be used in many ways and no matter how full our office was, it never appeared to be to crowded. We always had space to put people. We always made sure people had seats available. We placed the seats in places where everyone had enough space to move around. At times we interviewed up to 100 employees in a day. We moved the chairs in a row and placed them directly across from the main desk in the office. Moving the chairs to this position, helped improve our customer service. We spoke to everyone coming in the door, everyone coming into our office always received attention as soon as they came in. Right over the chairs, I Re-created "The BelFlex Wall of Wall."

We always answered our phone in less than three rings. We created a flow system for our phone traffic. My admin was only required to transfer calls. She was responsible for controlling the flow of the office. Everyone understood their flow in our phone traffic.

What is "The Wall Of Wow"

A "Wow Award" is given to an employee if someone working at their job site calls or writes an email, pointing out a behavior where they went above and beyond. On the Wow Award, the employees name is placed and the reason for receiving the award is mentioned and the employee is given a $25 Gift card. Each Wow award had a signature from the person who nominated the employee for the award. The "Wall of Wow" was ready to move to another wall after my two years in Tuscaloosa. The best feeling I remember, when candidates would come in the door and see the name of a person they knew on the wall. Other employees would bring their kids in and show them where they were located on the wall.

I didn't know my way around Tuscaloosa.

There are advantages and disadvantages to moving to a place where you don't know anybody. One of the advantages I had, I only seen fresh faces. I imagine this would be a different feeling if I recruited for positions in Mansfield, Ohio where I'm from. I would know why they quit their job two years ago. Depending on the situation I would know of the crimes before I completed the background check. This gave our candidates faith in our office as well, they knew our goal was to put them to work, not judge them or waste their time.

Not knowing my way around town was tough at first but then I learned that all I had to do was be dedicated to driving around town. When my job description changed to Selling Branch Manager, I was given the freedom to drive around town and look for clients. I learned the advantages of getting lost, you learn streets that you wouldn't take if you already knew your way around. I would drive and make a wrong turn and find people. I looked at neighborhoods in a marketing way instead of placing judgment. This helped me know where to place signs when I needed to ramp up our candidate pools. We had this thing in our office called the "Panic Button" I would use it if we ever got low on candidates. Most of the time this was used to bring in more Forklift drivers. We would release an all out "Take Tuscaloosa" approach. I researched the volume of certain addresses and I used that to determine where people needed the most help. I used researched addresses and driving distance to create rewards within the job offer for employees. We learned how to add benefits to a lower paying jobs. When we needed diversity, I would look at my addresses and place extra signs in those areas. We always paid close attention to our numbers. We wanted to make sure everyone had the opportunity to interview for a position and we interviewed everyone who wanted to schedule one. Many times we took walk-ins ready to go. We always made time to bring on new candidates. We always treated our senior employees the same. If they ever needed any help at their location, we made time for them. Our goal was to never let our employees feel like we forgot about them.

Every Client had a contact person other than myself.

When I took over the office in Tuscaloosa, we only had one client, Faurecia. Faurecia had over 100+ BelFlex employees year round. During my two years as the manager of the office we had less than a 10% turnover ratio at Faurecia. To add more detail, the average length it took for an employee to be hired on at Faurecia extended to one year at one point. Therefore, we had to keep our employees happy for the entire year until Faurecia was ready to hire them. Since our office grew so much under my leadership, going from 1 to 15 clients, I always wanted to make Faurecia feel special. We didn't have a single employee leave Faurecia to go to any of our other clients. I placed my senior recruiter on the Faurecia account and her job was to communicate with Faurecia daily. She was responsible for sending reports, checking the time clock, she was trained to complete payroll and after every day she was required to give me a report on Faurecia. We followed this process with every client we added and I backed up all of my employees if they weren't available when the client needed them. We had a 24 hour rule in our office and all of us were always available after hours to support our clients at any time. I led by example and I gave employees cell phones with access to emails. Even though we left work it was understood that if the phone rung you had to answer it. This is Why I hate cell phones.

We always worked ahead.

I was never concerned with the amount of background test or drug test I administered. My goal was to always be ready when our clients needed us. Out of the two years I managed the office, we only missed filling one forklift driver and the position only went unfilled for one day. After that incident, we never fell short again and because we worked ahead and we never needed to stay late to fill the positions. We used our temporary employee date base to place employees in folders. This gave us the advantage to send out messages to multiple employees at once. Each folder contain different employees. Each folder had employees with different situations, drug test needed, forklift test passed, etc. We had folders for Forklift Drivers, Admins,etc. I understood if we updated all of our information, the work was already done. For the record my office passed two perfect I-9 audits with perfect rating, these audits were conducted by our corporate office. We took pride in having them correct.

Every client had their own Ready board. I changed the older version of the BelFlex Ready board to an excel spreadsheet for Faurecia. I used the data collected from the spreadsheet combined with the data from our employee data base, tracking reasons for termination. The information we collected help convince the Faurecia in Fountain Inn, South Carolina, there was no difference between hiring someone fresh out of high school compared to someone with warehouse experience. My research helped expand the candidate pool in Fountain, Inn South Carolina. The data we collected proved that as long as the person is willing to work anybody can make it in a warehouse.