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Company: Hirsh Precision Products
Industry: Precision Machining
Contact: Amanda White, Recruitment Manager
For Amanda White, who manages the entire recruitment function at Hirsh Precision Products in partnership with the team’s hiring managers, finding qualified manufacturing talent had become increasingly difficult. As someone who "fell into recruitment" after joining the company as a marketing specialist, Amanda found herself responsible for the full recruitment cycle - from writing job descriptions to onboarding new hires. Hirsh Precision, which specializes in precision machining, regularly needs to fill three critical categories of roles:
Before implementing FactoryFix, Amanda faced significant challenges. She lacked clear hiring timelines for technical roles and struggled to find candidates with specific equipment expertise. The generic job boards she used didn't speak the "language" of manufacturing, lacking the ability to search for specialized skills or technologies. This left her with what she describes as a "spray and pray" approach without strategic targeting.
These challenges directly impacted business operations. When QA positions remained unfilled, they created bottlenecks that prevented the company from expanding night crews or weekend shifts, ultimately limiting growth and production capacity.
Amanda first discovered FactoryFix through industry resources like the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the "Creators Wanted" initiative in late 2023. Unlike generic job boards, FactoryFix offered machining-specific candidate targeting, filters tailored to particular equipment and technologies, an AI Copilot that automated pre-screening, candidate outreach, and evaluation, along with comprehensive labor market reports, all within one platform.
"I had been waiting for a tool like FactoryFix," Amanda explained. "In a world where there are specialized platforms for software developers or nurses, manufacturing hadn't had that yet."
FactoryFix Copilot has been a game-changer for Amanda's recruiting workflow. As a one-person recruitment team balancing multiple responsibilities, Amanda needed a solution that could maintain engagement with candidates without constant monitoring.
The platform's immediate response capability has dramatically improved candidate experience. Before FactoryFix, Amanda struggled to respond to new candidates in a timely manner, potentially causing candidates to lose interest or view the opportunity as less legitimate due to delayed responses. Now, Copilot maintains consistent dialogue with candidates and provides them with clear next steps, creating a professional experience while freeing Amanda to focus on higher-value tasks.
The way Copilot dynamically screens candidates has unlocked valuable insights about candidates that might otherwise be missed. Amanda notes that in manufacturing, technical expertise doesn't always translate to polished resume writing. The conversational approach allows Copilot to elicit more contextualized answers about candidates' backgrounds and technical familiarity, revealing qualified candidates who might have been overlooked based on resume review alone.
FactoryFix's scoring system has helped Amanda prioritize her limited time by starting with the most promising candidates. The system combines numerical ratings with specific highlighted attributes, such as job stability and communication timeliness, giving Amanda a comprehensive view of each applicant without having to manually review every detail.
The labor market reports from FactoryFix provided Amanda with specific salary benchmarks and competitive data that transformed Hirsh’s approach to technical roles.
"I used the labor market report to see exactly where we fell in the compensation range for a Quality Engineer position," Amanda explains. "The report showed us numerically how far off our salary range was from market rates, which explained why we were receiving applications from candidates without the necessary qualifications."
This data allowed Amanda to approach leadership with concrete evidence rather than subjective feedback. Armed with these specific metrics, she adjusted the salary range and refined the job requirements for a Quality Engineer position that had remained vacant for 370 days. Within days of implementing these changes, qualified applicants began applying through FactoryFix.
"As soon as we adjusted the parameters based on what I learned from that labor market report, we got a completely different pool of candidates," Amanda notes. "We hired directly from that pool approximately two to three weeks later."
Beyond filling specific positions, these reports revealed unexpected insights about their talent competition. Previously, Hirsh believed they were primarily competing with other job shops for machining talent. The data showed they were actually competing with OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) who were recruiting from the same talent pool but offering different compensation structures.
"That changed how I approach creating job descriptions and helped me be more strategic with our recruiting budget," Amanda says. "When we need someone with specific technical capabilities, we now know we need to position ourselves differently to attract that talent."
Since implementing FactoryFix six months ago, Hirsh Precision has been able to establish concrete hiring timelines and expectations:
The platform has dramatically improved candidate quality. In one notable example, they found a candidate with experience on four out of their five most complex machines - a rare combination of skills they hadn't encountered through previous recruitment channels.
Amanda now processes significantly more candidates in less time. "I'm able to go through way more candidates and get way more qualified ones in front of our hiring managers a lot faster," she explains. "I have probably saved myself so many hours not having to go through and read through every single candidate."
The impact extends beyond efficiency to creating structured recruitment metrics. Amanda now tracks:
These metrics help Hirsh make data-driven decisions about their recruitment strategy and resource allocation.
Amanda continues to explore additional FactoryFix features, including custom candidate preferences that help Copilot understand their ideal candidates even better. She's particularly interested in using the platform's growing capabilities to further refine their candidate targeting and screening processes.
"FactoryFix has been a game-changer for our hiring process," Amanda concluded. "It's not just about finding more candidates, it's about finding the right ones with the specific technical skills we need to grow our business."
FactoryFix maintains the manufacturing industry's most comprehensive talent database, tracking detailed information on skills, experience, and career preferences to deliver better matches for your open roles.
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