For many business owners over the past year, making the right hires has become a challenging task. Recently, the number of job openings has surpassed the number of job seekers—this shift in the labor market makes it more difficult to find qualified applicants. Using the right tools could mean the difference between prolonging the hiring struggle or finding valuable candidates to grow your business. 

Zane Lee, President of Sidney Lee Welding Supply sat down with Independent Welding Distributors Cooperative (IWDC) to discuss his hiring challenges and how using CareerPlug’s applicant tracking system (ATS) helped him attract the right candidates. 

Sidney Lee Welding Supply has been providing customers with quality welding supplies for over fifty years. Located in five locations across Georgia, they operate with the mission of providing the best products and the highest level of customer service. Not only do they assist a wide variety of customers, but they are also the factory distributor for many major manufacturers like Miller Electric. Watch the video below to learn about what’s working in Lee’s hiring process.

Sidney Lee Welding Supply’s Hiring Challenges 

With Sidney Lee Welding Supply operating throughout five locations in one state, the majority of the positions they hire are for drivers. Lee states that their main hiring challenge is a lack of high-quality candidates for these driver roles. 

Lee says: “We were having a problem even finding people to talk to. We were having issues with drivers in particular. Sometimes we’d hire people and they wouldn’t even last a week. We’d go through periods where we didn’t even have any resumes to look at—we’d have nothing.” 

Before CareerPlug, Lee was using job boards like Indeed and ZipRecruiter. After continuously struggling to make the right hires, he needed a platform that could attract quality candidates and evaluate them easily. Luckily, Lee discovered CareerPlug through an IWDC email, which he then passed on to his operations manager. He explains what happened when they switched to CareerPlug: 

“I told them to give [CareerPlug] a try because what we were doing was not working at all. We had used Indeed and I believe ZipRecruiter, but with CareerPlug we got lots of resumes, and they were actually people we wanted to talk to. We had more matches for the jobs available. Before, if someone had a clean NVR and a driving record we’d give them a try. Now we can look at their past experiences because we’re looking for the kind of guys that drive milk trucks, potato chip trucks, where they actually have to get out and deal with people—those make good drivers.” 

With CareerPlug, Lee can instantly post jobs to all the major job boards (like Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Talent.com, and more) with just one click. No matter the source, all applicants show up in one place: his CareerPlug dashboard. Plus, CareerPlug’s built-in evaluation tools make it easier to contact the top candidates quickly without wasting any time on unqualified applicants. 

Improving Candidate Quality with Attractive Job Postings 

With CareerPlug’s help, the team at Sidney Lee learned how to create appealing job postings to attract their ideal candidates. Lee explains how taking advantage of CareerPlug’s tutorials benefitted his overall business: 

“One of the things that our guys did was take advantage of the training to learn how to write the job descriptions to get the person we wanted. That helped a lot. When we first started using it we had around fifty people to look at that were good applicants. Out of that first week or two we hired five people. We were having a lot of trouble staffing two of our stores and we have them up to full capacity now.” 

A Future With CareerPlug

Lee says he’s looking forward to using CareerPlug to hire new roles that will expand his business in the coming months. He trusts CareerPlug to help make high-quality hires consistently so that he can spend less time hiring and more time running his business.

“We’ve been using it for truck drivers so far but in the coming months we’ll probably use it for other positions. I’d like to have an inside support person, maybe some counter-sales people, possibly a person agent, and I’m kind of excited to see how it does with that. We’re almost big enough where we feel like we need a human resources person, and I think that’ll be a big plus for us. I’m also one of the board members at IWDC and I want to make a comment that, you know as business owners, we get so busy sometimes. But there are other things that [CareerPlug] offers that are very valuable, and we need to actually look at these services because some of them may be the answer to our problems. And I think CareerPlug is something every member could use right now.”  

Attract More High-Quality Applicants with CareerPlug

CareerPlug gives you all the tools you need to attract, evaluate, and hire the right candidates. Our applicant tracking system helps reduce your time to hire without sacrificing quality – so you can spend less time hiring and more time running your business.

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