Sherwood Recruiting / Case studies / Gurley Leep
Gurley Leep: 782 hires in 31 months, at about $268 each.
A multi-state dealer group, hiring every week at every store, and no corporate recruiting function. One recruiter built it from scratch and ran it at volume.
* In the three-month window Indeed measured.
Hiring everywhere, and no function to run it
Gurley Leep Automotive is a dealer group with 36 franchises across Indiana, Michigan, Illinois and Iowa. Dealerships hire all year, across sales, service, parts, finance and the office, and the group had no corporate recruiting function to run it.
Larry first worked with the group as an outside recruiting consultant from his own firm. The results led the group to bring him in house to build its corporate recruiting function from scratch, as its sole recruiter.
One process, every store
- A system the stores would use. The applicant tracking system was implemented and run as the single place every candidate lived, from job posting to start date.
- Hiring managers trained to hire. Managers across the group's locations were trained on interviewing and on moving candidates quickly, so the process held without a recruiter in every room.
- Job advertising that paid for itself. The group's Indeed campaigns were rebuilt. Indeed's own account review, comparing October 2018 to January 2019 with the months before, recorded the change.
Cost per application down 81 percent, in Indeed's own numbers
- Cost per application fell from $71.63 to $13.53.
- Sponsored applications rose from 146 to 1,888, and sponsored clicks from 3,205 to 15,750.
- Apply rate rose from 4.6 percent to 11.9 percent.
- Cost per application reached the level of Indeed's top ten automotive advertisers.
“By far the largest improvement I have seen in such a short period of time.”
Indeed strategic account manager, automotive, in the account review
782 hires, and the hires stayed
From January 2019 to July 2021, corporate recruiting made 782 hires for the group, with about $209,000 in total recruiting spend: about $268 per hire. The busiest month produced 53 hires.
Speed was not traded for fit. In the three-month window Indeed measured, 83 hires came through Larry's recruiting and 8 left: 90 percent retention, against 75 percent for the company overall in the same window.
The same approach runs every Sherwood Recruiting engagement today: one owner for the whole function, a system the hiring managers actually use, and direct channels that make agencies unnecessary. The volume here was dealership hiring; the AFEELA case study shows the same method on a vehicle launch.
The same work, on your calendar
The first hire in talent
The build this case study describes: a system, a process and trained hiring managers, then the person who runs it next.
The launch team build
Volume against a date. Twenty to fifty hires, planned backward from the launch, without the agency bill.
The stalled-search reset
When one role will not close, the same sourcing and advertising discipline, applied to a single search for two weeks.
Next case study: Fisker, 408 hires in 24 months. More on the method: agency elimination economics and the sourcing playbook, on larrysherwoodjr.com.