How Michael Ortigoza used Skillit to scale craft hiring at Brasfield & Gorrie
At Skillit, our best customers typically come to us with one of three goals:
Help grow their self-perform division
Help them expand into new regions
Help them stop turning away work
Field recruiter Michael Ortigoza
For Brasfield & Gorrie, they had just won a large power plant project near Atlanta, Georgia, and needed to quickly scale one of their self-perform divisions. This meant pulling off the hiring of at least 100 full-time pipefitters, carpenters, welders and laborers - in one month. A herculean task that fell on the shoulders of field recruiter Michael Ortigoza and his team.
Michael, like many craft recruiters, had used staffing agencies and job boards before, but he had serious doubts about how effective they’d be when it came to managing a funnel of thousands of workers during a labor crisis.
What he needed was reach, precision, and insight to help find highly skilled craft professionals in a tough market. Michael was also interested in getting his field team more involved in hiring, but no tool offered that kind of collaboration—except Skillit.
Michael had used Skillit before to source laborers and carpenters in Birmingham, Alabama, but by this time, we had tripled the supply of workers in Atlanta and rolled out the very features he needed to source for the power plant project near Atlanta.
With Skillit’s field-office collaboration tools, geospatial “map view” of craft pro locations, and purpose-built messaging tools, Michael’s team collaborated seamlessly, pinpointed craft pros within a mile of their job site, and quickly connected with them—without the back-and-forth headache.
Michael and his team were so effective at levering Skillit, that after just 128 messages to craft pros resulted in 65 responses (a 51% connection rate) and 10 hires (a 15% hiring rate, equal to 7.8% top-to-bottom) in a matter of days, Michael and his team were asked by leadership to slow their roll to help keep hiring goals in line with the project timeline.
Jeffery Evans, a heavy equipment operator from Statham, GA, was one of those hired in the first wave and said “when Brasfield & Gorrie offered me a position, Skillit actually called me to share the good news. I'm thrilled to be at a great employer like Brasfield & Gorrie and really happy with how Skillit handled everything. The entire experience was excellent.”
“Skillit has proven to be an exceptionally effective resource throughout this process.”
Senior field manager Corey Collier summed the whole experience up perfectly – “The project required a substantial number of hires from day one. With support from Michael and his team, the project team has set a high standard for large-scale job startups. Skillit has proven to be an exceptionally effective resource throughout this process.”
About Brasfield & Gorrie
Brasfield & Gorrie is a top 25 Engineering News-Record general contractor headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama with over 4,000 employees and 220 active projects across 17 states. The company is known for its commitment to the "Golden Rule," which emphasizes putting people first, and self performing much of their own work so they can exercise greater control over time and money spent and mitigate risks related to schedule overruns and cost escalations.
