Twin City Fan hires 253 people a year instead of 427, with nobody on the phones.
Two hundred people apply for hourly roles every month across six plants. Twin City Fan screens every one of them by phone, the way they always have. The difference is that a recruiter no longer spends 250 hours a month doing it.
What the team was up against
Twin City Fan runs a recruiting team of three and a half people for a company of a thousand. One and a half of them were committed to hourly hiring: one full time, one part time.
Two hundred people applied for hourly roles every month, and the policy was to phone screen ninety percent of them. In rural South Dakota, where the plants sit in Elkton, Aberdeen and Mitchell, you cannot afford to skip anyone. That came to two hundred and fifty hours of phone calls a month, on top of a twenty thousand dollar monthly advertising spend to bring the applicants in.
Ten percent of those applicants were hired. Sixty percent of hourly hires left within a year, so the team was refilling the same seats and screening the same volume again the following quarter.
How it rolled out
Twin City Fan did not switch everything over at once. Blucor started on two openings and widened as the team got comfortable handing over the first call.
- Oct 2024Two openings, a pilot2 openings
Twelve screenings, run while the team read the transcripts and decided whether the screening held up.
- 2025Extended across the hourly req list30 openings
782 screenings over the year, covering assemblers, welders, production workers and machine operators as reqs opened and closed.
- 2026 to dateRunning the whole hourly funnel68 openings
978 screenings across 17 role types so far this year. The recruiting team reviews results instead of making first calls.
Results
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Recruiter hours on phone screening each month One full time and one part time recruiter, before | 200 to 250 hrs | 0 hrs |
| Time to hire | 60 days | 20 days |
| Cost of screening hourly applicants 1.5 recruiters at about $100,000 fully loaded, against the Blucor subscription | About $150,000 a year | $60,000 a year |
| Company-wide turnover Reported by Twin City Fan | About 50% | 38% |
| People hired each year to hold headcount Reported by Twin City Fan | 427 | 253 |
- 1. Screening volume, role counts and rollout dates are measured from Blucor platform records for Twin City Fan between 23 October 2024 and 23 July 2026.
- 2. Before figures for team size, screening hours, applicant volume and advertising spend are as reported by Matt Dillon in an interview on 2 August 2024.
- 3. Turnover and annual hiring figures are company-wide and as reported by Matt Dillon in February 2026. Turnover was about 50% two years earlier, in the mid 40s the following year, and 38% in 2025.
- 4. The cost comparison uses the 1.5 recruiters Twin City Fan had committed to hourly screening at roughly $100,000 fully loaded each, against the Blucor annual subscription.
Why the hiring number came down
People hired each year to hold the same headcount, as reported by Twin City Fan.
Headcount did not shrink by that much. Most of that gap is people who stayed.
The screening is where that starts. When two hundred applicants a month have to pass through one and a half recruiters, the screening gets shorter and the questions get thinner, and people arrive on the plant floor who were never really a fit for the shift, the lifting or the drive. Those are the hires who leave inside a year and have to be made again.
Every applicant now gets the same full conversation, covering shift availability, physical requirements, certifications, distance and pay expectations, whether they are the first call of the day or the fortieth. Company-wide turnover has come down from about 50% to 38% across that period, and the team spends its hours on the candidates who are worth bringing in.
“All those things your recruiter is doing, our recruiter can do. I mean, she happens to be a computer, but she has relatively unlimited resources, whereas your human can probably only get to how many in a day.”
Where the account stands today
Measured from Blucor platform records for Twin City Fan between 25 April and 23 July 2026. Recruiter hours returned assume 45 minutes per applicant.
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