Company Profile
ABC Supply Co., Inc. is the largest wholesale distributor of roofing supplies in the United States and one of the nation’s largest distributors of siding, tools, windows, other select exterior building products and related supplies. Since our start in 1982, we’ve grown to become a national organization with more than 450 branches and other facilities in 44 states, over $4 billion in sales, more than 7,000 employees, and a company that has won the Gallup Great Workplace Award six years in a row.
Business Situation
ABC Supply Co. in the St. Louis market, which included six different locations, needed immediate temporary workers to meet their staffing demands due to heavy storms that passed through the Midwest in the spring of 2012. They had never previously used a temp staffing company locally, but due to the urgency, they decided to partner with Human Resource Staffing. They made this decision due to the high number of employees they needed to acquire and the lack of the resources they had locally in their HR Department. The skill set, experience and education of the needed employees were wide-ranging and would require different recruiters to handle each. These positions included warehouse workers, general labors, clerical, purchasing, warehouse managers and inside sales. There were two weeks to set up and deliver 140 people in the first month.
Solution
Human Resource Staffing went to work immediately by first analyzing the requirements and the number of staff needed to produce the results in a short time frame. We partnered with ABC Supply’s corporate human resource department, working closely with them to make sure we were providing quality applicants that would fit with their award-winning culture. We set up a one-day job fair at a local hotel with three of our recruiters, the VP of Sales, the account executive in charge of the account, along with two corporate HR representatives from ABC Supply’s corporate office. The team proceeded to do over 125 interviews for the day, with each interview lasting no more than 10-15 minutes and a grading scale of 1-4 for each applicant. The day after the job fair, we started re-contacting the top candidates to schedule a time to bring them in for job-specific testing, drug testing, reference and background checks so that offers could be made. This was handled by the three Human Resource Staffing offices so that it was geographically favorable for the final candidates depending on where they would be placed at one of the six ABC Supply locations. With any positions where there were not enough quality candidates, Human Resource Staffing supplemented this by contacting current employees in our database, ads on job boards, employee referrals, word of mouth, and walk-ins to ABC Supply stores. The Human Resource Staffing Account Executive met with each store manager individually at all six locations so that they could identify a good cultural fit that each manager was looking for in their own store.
The Results
Within one month of the start of the project, Human Resource Staffing provided a total of 140 employees to ABC Supply Co., Inc. during this very challenging time. It was not just the quantity of the temporary workers, but also the quality that we were able to deliver. Many workers worked an additional 8-32 hours of overtime weekly. This scope of business continued for about five months until the production slowed down, and approximately six were hired on permanently. ABC Supply Co., Inc. said that they had tried this same process around the country previously, but we were the only company to exceed their expectations.
