Landesign has provided landscaping services to St. Louis and the surrounding areas for more than 20 years. From the beginning, owner George Tucker didn't set a large budget for marketing and advertising, yet still managed to build an incredible company on word of mouth and reputation alone.

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But as the company has grown (and continues to grow), it became clear to Landesign’s HR Director Lara Beckemeier that there was room for improvement in the way that they approached recruiting.

While word-of-mouth is great, she knew there were other channels for sourcing candidates—career sites, social media, their own company website—that they weren’t taking advantage of. She also knew their all-paper application and on-boarding process (which was tedious and time-consuming) could use an update.

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As HR Director, Lara oversees the Team Engine job posting dashboard for all Landesign companies, so one thing Lara loved right away about Team Engine was the ability to create job postings for multiple locations within the same account in the software. This allowed the local staff at each location to conduct their own screenings and interviews, while effortlessly keeping Lara in the loop from afar.

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Now, when Lara sees in the software that someone has accepted a job offer, she can start gathering paperwork and planning their onboarding…from several states away and without ever having to bug hiring managers for updates!

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Not only has the collaborative hiring saved Lara time, it’s given more autonomy to the hiring managers at each location. Now they, not Lara, choose who they want to interview and set up the appointments directly with applicants. Even better, they never find themselves scratching their heads anymore about where to find the people they need to fill out their crews. They just open up the software and start browsing applications.

Before Team Engine, when someone would walk in to apply, Lara would give them the paper application, ask pre-screening questions on the spot, and let them know someone would be in touch if interested. She’d then add her notes to the completed application, scan it, and send it to Shaun (the General Manager) at the yard, which is in the next town over from the central office where Lara works. If interested in interviewing, Shaun would then call the applicant to continue the process. Other times, candidates might have applied directly with Shaun and Lara wouldn’t even learn about them until after they were already hired. “There was no system,” Lara says, “and everything was very reliant on communication between Shaun and I.”

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Now, when someone walks in to apply, Lara simply gives them the link for the digital application and tells them to expect a text from Landesign once the application has been reviewed. “I tell them that they don’t need to keep calling us back and that we’ll do all the communication over text. They like the clear expectations it sets, and they like that we text with them instead of calling or emailing.”