Webinar
60 min watch
Jul 24, 2025

Seasonal hiring solved: TruGreen's million dollar breakthrough.

How TruGreen's streamlined career site experience increased conversion, saved time, and reduced costs.

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This blog is part of a larger collection of client story content for .
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This webinar is part of a larger collection of client story content.
See the full collection

This blog is part of a larger collection of client story content for these companies.

Saving $1,800,000 with a Conversational Career Site.

How TruGreen’s streamlined career site experience increased conversion, saved time, and reduced costs.

A complete career site transformation.

Tru Green’s new career site focuses on essentials — rather than inundating visitors with content, it lets the candidates dictate the journey they want.

Meet the speakers.

Jessica Manucy
Jessica Manucy
Head of Talent Acquisition, TruGreen

Strategic and innovative Talent Acquisition leader with extensive experience in developing, leading and optimizing an enterprise-wide TA function in the United States and globally.

Jessica Manucy
Jessica Manucy
Head of Talent Acquisition, TruGreen

Strategic and innovative Talent Acquisition leader with extensive experience in developing, leading and optimizing an enterprise-wide TA function in the United States and globally.

Veronica Caraballo
Veronica Caraballo
TA Operations Manager, TruGreen

Crafting and implementing comprehensive recruiting strategies that enable our regions to flourish during busy seasons and navigate business changes.

Watch the on-demand webinar:

Transcript

Hayden Rodrigue (00:00:09):

Just let some people come on in this morning watching the participant tick up. Good morning, Veronica. Good morning, Jessica.

Jessica Manucy (00:00:21):

Good morning.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:00:23):

How are both of you today? I

Jessica Manucy (00:00:25):

Doing great. Yeah, doing awesome.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:00:28):

I love your triggering backgrounds. It's very, very well branded.

Veronica Caraballo (00:00:33):

Thank you. Actually, someone on my team created this Mina on my team. She did a fantastic job creating it and we kind of use it across all of ta.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:00:45):

It's beautiful. Is this a real wall that exists in your office somewhere or it's just an AI or a Photoshopped?

Jessica Manucy (00:00:55):

It was in one of our call centers at one point.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:00:58):

Oh, cool.

Jessica Manucy (00:00:59):

Yeah, that's where I think the original came from, but our team has created some really good backgrounds. We typically have them for every season and yeah, it's good.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:01:15):

Very cool. Yeah, we've got a couple few as well. We have this on a few walls in our offices, which is fun. I like it. All the little robots and then Olivia up here in the corner.

Jessica Manucy (00:01:30):

Love it.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:01:31):

Cool. Well, I think we can kind of get started here. I'm sure some people will continue to trickle in as we get chatting, but hello everyone. Welcome. We're so glad you could finally join us today for today's webinar titled Seasonal Hiring Solved Trug Green's, $1.8 million Breakthrough with Conversational Career Sites. My name is Hayden Rodrick. I am a product marketing manager here at Paradox, specifically focused on how our career sites can help solve problems for companies just like yours. And today I'm really excited to be joined by some of our incredible friends at TruGreen who are here to share their firsthand experience and insights. We have Jessica Nui, the head of talent acquisition at TruGreen, as well as Veronica Caravalo their talent acquisitions operation manager. They've got a fantastic story to tell you about how they've revolutionized their seasonal hiring by utilizing conversational ai. We're going to deep dive into how TruGreen achieved a remarkable $1.8 million breakthrough utilizing our conversational career sites. And then you'll hear directly from Jessica and Veronica about their journey and the incredible results that they've seen so far. So let's get started. Jessica, would you like to kick us off with a little bit more about yourself?

Jessica Manucy (00:02:52):

Sure. I am Jessica Nui. I am the head of talent acquisition at Trug Green. I've been here a little over four years. Prior to this I worked for Republic Services, which is the second largest waste management company in the us. I've been in talent acquisition and HR for about 20 years, and super excited to be here today.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:03:17):

Nice. And then Veronica, a quick intro.

Veronica Caraballo (00:03:21):

Yes. My name is Veronica. I am the talent Acquisition Operations Manager here at TruGreen. I've been with the company for almost four years now. I've been in actually talent acquisition for a little over 15 years of my career from working in property management to working in nursing facilities all around talent acquisition, high volume and corporate level positions, but excited to be talking with you all today.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:03:49):

Thank you both for being here. Let's just dive in then, I guess. So could you briefly describe a little bit more about TruGreen, what you guys do, and then describe Trug Green's hiring scope and the typical candidate profiles and your team structure?

Jessica Manucy (00:04:05):

Yes, so we are the largest lawn care company in the us. We do have over 200 branches in the US and Canada. We've been in the lawn care industry a long time. We typically will hire somewhere between 15 to 22,000 people a year. Since I've been here, it's kind of fluctuated a bit. Last year we did a little over 17,000. This year we're probably on pace to be a little over 15,000. And the unique challenge about TruGreen is that we typically hire the bulk of those people within the first five months of the year. So we're extremely seasonal in our hiring. Typically, we hire most people that are either sales people, they're actually knocking on doors to sell our products or they're production people, so if you can think they're the people that are actually doing the lawn care. And then we have two call center roles that we hire a lot of people in the customer care side and then also inside sales, which both sit in call centers.

(00:05:26):

So that's what the bulk of our hires are, and we do hire across the whole country and in Canada, our team in talent acquisition is fully remote, and we right now have 96 full full-time recruiters, or we call them talent acquisition partners. We are regionally aligned, so across the US and Canada, the team would hire for all of the roles within their specific regions that they work for. They don't necessarily live in those regions, but they can support being remote, they can support a different region. And then to drive the volume that we need in those first few months of the year, we typically flex up using contractors. For the first three years we were here, we were using our PO model, so we can sometimes get up to about 265 recruiters in those first few months of the year just depending on the volume we're trying to drive there.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:06:47):

Very nice. Yeah. We'll touch on seasonality more in a little bit, but next I want to get into your hiring challenges before paradox. What key kind of hiring challenges we've got some here led you to explore AI for a more streamlined process?

Veronica Caraballo (00:07:04):

Yes, no, absolutely. So like many high volume employers, we were experiencing increased pressure to hire faster without compromising our candidate experience. Also thinking about the candidate quality as well, especially during our peak season, as Jessica mentioned. I mean we have a lot of people to hire in such a short timeframe. So some of the things that we were really going into was an overwhelming application volume, which involved us manually screening those candidates, scheduling them for an interview, and then also just that repetitive follow-up that if candidates didn't pick up or they weren't available at that time when we were reaching out to them, that constant follow-up as well, which could also delay our hiring process as you know. So those were some of the bottlenecks. So we were really looking at paradox and we recognized that AI could be a strategic solution, so what can we take off the recruiter's plate to essentially streamline the process, make it easier for them, take away some of those administrative tasks so they can really focus on what matters most.

(00:08:06):

Again, that candidate experience and also the relationship with their field leadership teams. So we implemented Trudy as our conversational AI assistant, so we essentially streamlined engagement, accelerated the speed to hire and ensured a great consistently across consistency across all of our locations. We have over 250 locations across the US and Canada, but really incorporating Trudy was super essential to our process because we stopped working. Some of our recruiters stopped working at five o'clock because we really do promote work-life balance here at TruGreen as well. So while our recruiters are relaxing, enjoying supper with their family, Trudy's there, scheduling those interviews for them, answering candidate 24 hours a day, one thing that I really enjoyed that me that paradox does is they kind of send us a heat map so we can identify when most of our candidates are interacting with Trudy. And surprisingly, it's really after hours or not surprising because a lot of folks, they have a day job or they have things that they're doing throughout the day, but having Trudy was really impactful 24 7 availability answering questions and the cool thing about it's that we can see how Trudy's responding and build that knowledge base with her as well.

(00:09:30):

So I would say that's really what drove us to pursue the AI technology side.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:09:37):

Totally. You mentioned candidates being able to interact with Trudy at any hours and then also recruiters being able to have that free time, that work-life balance. What were some of the other big pain points prior to the paradox transformation that your recruiters and candidates were feeling using your old career site and how did this kind of impact your talent attraction?

Jessica Manucy (00:10:03):

Our old site was really not mobile friendly at all, and as we know, most candidates are going to apply on their phone. I mean now they are, and if you don't have a site that is mobile friendly, that is not good because people, you get a lot of drop off from that. We had a static site, it was very text heavy, not a lot of pictures, not a lot of actual people testimony and videos and different things like that, and it was also very difficult to make changes to our site. We had a self-service model with our previous people that were hosting our site, so if we wanted to make changes, it was, here's the instructions on how to do that, and I am not super technical and don't really have the time to get in there and try to figure out how to make changes to a website. So that was definitely a pain point when I first got here, we had our A TS and our career site and a CRM tool and none of these things were talking to each other, so it was a very clunky process for the candidates as well because they would apply in one system and then we would call them as a lead and ask them to complete an application in our A TS system. It was

(00:11:50):

A lot of work on our team and it was, I mean, as you can imagine asking a candidate to do one thing and then being like, oh, well now formally apply over here. I mean, it's not a good experience for them. So that was also a big pain point and a lot of these issues really hurt our employer brand. They made it difficult for us to attract the right people too in a tight labor market, so we knew we needed to make a lot of changes.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:12:23):

Totally. And those disparate experiences can definitely affect how candidates perceive, how candidates feel about the hiring process and to kind of consolidate it definitely, I'm sure has streamlined the process in many, many ways, so very exciting.

Jessica Manucy (00:12:39):

Yeah.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:12:40):

Cool. Next we're going to talk a little bit more about the seasonality that you guys touched on and navigating that with ai. How has the conversational career site and Trudy specifically helped Tru gain manage the seasonal hiring influx, reducing RPO reliance, improving cost effectiveness, especially during those peak months that you can kind of see front loaded at the top of the year?

Jessica Manucy (00:13:06):

Yeah, I know Veronica hit on a couple of these points earlier, but Trudy really engages applicants instantly, so she's going to prescreen, she can schedule them quickly. This has really been a game changer for us, especially when we're dealing with this high volume of candidates that come in and those first five months of the year. This has allowed our team to spend less time with the administrative side of things and a lot more time actually doing more meaningful conversations with our candidates, really trying to have good sourcing, trying to find really good quality candidates. It's freed up their time to spend on more talent acquisition versus traditional, I guess, recruiting, if that makes sense. Totally. Yeah. This actually has allowed us to not depend on our RPO at all. As I said, the first three years I was here, we did have an RPO model, and this year we actually went a different route and did not use an RPO, so it was a significant cost savings for us, and it's also improved our cost per hire, our time to fill. There's a lot of things that go along with that, but yeah, I

Hayden Rodrigue (00:14:46):

Think that

Jessica Manucy (00:14:47):

Probably sums it up

Hayden Rodrigue (00:14:48):

Very interesting. Yeah, as you talk about the cost of an RPO and just managing that and managing that relation, there's a lot of stakes when it comes to high turnover when it comes to profit. There's a lot of costs associating with hiring someone from RPO costs to sourcing background checks, onboarding, the list goes on and on, and all of these things can not only just affect hiring speed conversion candidate experience, but it can also really affect your profit margins. And so you can kind of see here what all of these things kind of compounding can decrease profits. And so that's just an interesting thing to tie into the seasonality of it all as well as just hiring experiences in general. We think about TA as a business objective now, and I think it's fascinating the way we're thinking about it in the way that the True Green team has thought about tying hiring directly to profit margins. Very interesting. Next, I want to talk about the solution to these problems that you guys were facing, which was a complete career site transformation. What was the initial reaction to this career site and then Trudy from candidates from your recruiting team, and were there any unexpected benefits or challenges along the way?

Veronica Caraballo (00:16:14):

Yeah, so the reaction to Trudy was overwhelmingly positive. One cool thing that I really like is we're able to meet with our paradox team and do an overview of how our career site is actually doing. They gave us this interesting stat which shows over 10,000 candidates during our peak season alone. So that peak season that Jessica mentioned earlier, we received over 10,000 just thank yous and just positive comments in general from the candidates as well as some of them were like, Hey, am I talking to a real person? If not, just thank you so much. I really appreciate all your help. So it's great to kind of see that communication and that interaction from candidates to Trudy, but candidates really appreciated that 24 7 responsiveness. Having a question on your mind just going there, typing a quick question in and getting a response because we built that out based off of questions that we've seen.

(00:17:18):

You guys actually send us over 500 questions to answer, and it's great that we did that because just looking at the results from the conversations that candidates are having has been amazing, but it's essentially the ease of completing an application. We have text to apply, we have the chat to apply if our employees are referring someone. We also have that text to apply for employee referrals, which is awesome, but honestly, Trudy's able to schedule interviews outside of the traditional business hours so that way in case candidates have a day job or again, they're busy throughout the day, they're able to just follow up with Trudy at the convenience of being in their own home, looking at their schedule and properly scheduling that time. And it really has helped reduce a lot of that. No-show to the interview. So when I say that I know initially when we rolled this out, there were some hesitations from our talent acquisition team.

(00:18:20):

I mean with reason, anything new that we're bringing on, anything that could be changed is a little bit scary at first, but it quickly, as they were utilizing Trudy and they really saw that benefit, that perception quickly changed for our team. When they came in the next day, they're like, okay, great, we'll utilize it. Let's see what happens. They utilized Trudy, they came in the next day and they're like, oh, my calendar is completely booked. And they were like, these were the candidates that I moved forward into this process. So they were very, very excited. I can't begin to tell you how many conversations I've had with Talent acquisition partners after the rollout and them just really going in there and utilizing it, just saying, Veronica, my calendar is full. I'm hitting my numbers for the week or for that month. It really sets a positive tone for the employee experience knowing that we heard them, knowing that we're freeing up time in their day so they can focus on actually talking to candidates.

(00:19:22):

So instead of them spending their day going through and scheduling people, they already have candidates scheduled and they can just have those conversations with them throughout the day. So it's really alleviating a lot of that time for them. The cool thing about Trudy as well is that she's simultaneously simultaneously scheduling multiple candidates at a time, so she's having these conversations with candidates that are visiting our career site. Not only that, she's also scheduling interviews, rescheduling canceling interviews if we choose. She's also sending interview prep information to our candidates. So again, this is really saving time throughout that day for our recruiters. I would say that's the biggest impact for us, just from the candidate's reaction to our recruiting team's reaction and just the benefit from the whole thing.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:20:17):

100%.

Jessica Manucy (00:20:17):

I think too, Trudy doesn't sound like a chatbot. That's another thing that I thought was really cool. Even though we gave her a lot of those responses, it's not like you're talking to a computer. She really feels like you're talking to a person, which we're in human resources. We don't want to lose that human aspect of anything. And that's one of the things that I thought was really cool specifically about paradox was because she learns it's not just these canned responses, and I thought that was really, really neat.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:21:01):

Yeah, that's definitely something we strive for. It's not just press one, if you want this job, press two. If you want that job, you're actually having a conversation and engaging back to the recruiter Fear of change. I feel like that's something that everyone can relate to. Anyone who's implementing New Tech can relate to that change management piece, and I think the best way to combat that is with results and show your team, there are reasons behind this and we are combating exactly what's your challenges that you've been talking to us about with and to show that directly and have that reaction of like, wow, this is incredible. We're seeing my calendar full, my interview scheduled for me. I love that anecdote. I think that's really, really cool. Let's show off the career site a little bit. We kind of have this less is more approach at Paradox. I feel like a lot of career sites can end up having a ton of content that candidates don't even know really where to start. They don't know what they're looking for, and so we want to give it this streamlined approach. Can you kind of walk us through how you determined what information was essential for your new career site and how this kind of focus has impacted candidate engagement and then conversion?

Veronica Caraballo (00:22:26):

Yes. So our approach to redesign the True Green Career site was both research driven and candidate focus because we want to make sure that we're thinking about everything that we do. We're thinking about it through the candidate's lenses, what's most important to them. So we actually collaborated closely with the Paradox team, combining their expertise and insight, what's most important to candidates, where they're spending most of their time as they're reviewing career pages, what's the normal candidate behavior? How long do they typically spend on each one, which was super important and great feedback as we were really designing our career page. So I mean, the result is something that we are genuinely proud of. So if anyone hasn't visited our career site, please feel free to visit. There's some cool little surprises as you're clicking on things that we absolutely love, but we really wanted a career site that reflects our values, our brand, and most importantly the need of the job seeker.

(00:23:26):

So benefit information, providing a brief description about each of our different departments, our core values, what's most important to us. So we really worked hard on creating something that was vibrant, a one page design that delivered all key information upfront, so that way we're avoiding candidates clicking on multiple different pages to try to find the information on our homepage. We have all the information that's most important to candidates, and of course once they review that and they want to know a little bit more, they can talk to Trudy. If not, they can visit those individual department pages where they can see some employee testimonials. They can see a little bit more about our sales, which is our territory sales positions, our lawn specialist opportunities, our CCTC care, some of those customer service roles as well. So the results were honestly immediate and measurable. We had high conversion rates from people visiting our site and actually completing an application faster times to apply. I think it takes about three minutes for a candidate to complete the application and it's solely chat to apply. We were looking for something that was also very mobile friendly. This day and age, a lot of folks are essentially utilizing their phones. They're always on the go. So simplicity really drove stronger engagement for us here, and that engagement is what converted into actual action, so people applying for the opportunity. So that's really what was the driving factor in our thought process behind our new career page.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:25:08):

It's beautiful. I remember the first time I set foot on it and landed on the page. I won't give away the fun little detail surprises, but it is very cute. I love all the little elements of interactivity and just dynamic and it feels clean. It feels new and engaging, and it's a beautiful site. You guys did a great job.

Jessica Manucy (00:25:32):

I have to say, Veronica and her team did an amazing job. I know she said at the beginning, they did a lot of research, but they really spent a lot of time looking at a bunch of different sites, right? Looking at what looks cool here, what do we like here, and then collaborating with the paradox team to say, can we do this? Can we do this, can we? I mean really just thinking outside the box, and I think they did a phenomenal job.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:26:03):

It's beautiful. It's beautiful. Thank you. Cool. You talked a little bit about just this interaction element that Trudy brings to the career site. It makes everything more dynamic, it makes candidates feel like they're being listened to. We've got a good example of just a conversational job search piece that she can do. This is just a small piece of what Trudy is capable of, but could you share a quick example of how Trudy's question and answer and screening skills have effectively identified strong candidates or quickly disqualified unsuitable ones, which obviously saves recruiters a ton of time?

Veronica Caraballo (00:26:45):

Yes, no, absolutely. So during our peak hiring season, I'll just give you an example from our production side. So during our peak hiring season, we're hiring for lawn specialists. So folks that are essentially outside, we're doing everything under the sun except cutting and mowing lawns, but we often receive hundreds of applications in such a short timeframe. So what our recruiters actually do to kind of filter through some of those applicants, so we can really talk to the candidates that are most interested in this opportunity. We have our recruiters actually move the candidates to the screen bucket. So our system that we utilize here, ATS, is Workday. So one thing that we do is we move our candidates to the screen bucket. Trudy will do her thing and just send out questions that we've identified as a talent acquisition team that are super important to help narrow down some of those candidates after the candidates complete those questions.

(00:27:43):

And simultaneously, I mean sending it out to multiple candidates at one time. After each candidate completes those questions, they get an either qualified or not qualified, which helps us narrow down, okay, these are the folks that best fit what we're looking for. They fully understand the seasonality of the opportunity, which a lot of folks don't realize that, especially if you live in Massachusetts or any of those areas where it snows. I mean, we are seasonal, mean we're out there all day where we're doing fertilized on the grass aeration, all of that. But during the winter time, we do go in and just our folks go on a seasonal active leave here at TruGreen, but just having Trudy really automate those q and a so that way our recruiters free up the time, look at those questions, see how the candidates answered, and then help navigate their conversations with the candidate.

(00:28:43):

So based off of the responses that candidates based off of how the candidates have responded to each of those questions, as our recruiters are contacting those candidates, it's really helping us navigate the conversations based off of what was most important to that candidate by the way they responded. So it's really helping us tailor each of those conversations for the candidate and making sure we're giving them that best experience, and also helping us beforehand know who would be qualified and not qualified for the role beforehand. So it's really boosting efficiency and improving our time to hire from there as well.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:29:17):

Very cool. Very cool. Based off all of that and all of the things that Trudy is doing in the backend, you've definitely seen some really, really incredible results with conversational ai. You guys were able to reduce your time to schedule from seven days all the way down to one day with Trudy. We'll dive into on the next slide a little bit how you were able to this, but I just want to clap. This is incredible and a big piece of this is still incorporating a recruiter touch point. Could you talk about that just briefly?

Veronica Caraballo (00:29:55):

I'm sorry, what was the question?

Hayden Rodrigue (00:29:56):

The recruiter touch point in the scheduling process where it's not just automatically scheduled, she still has to, Trudy is bringing up candidates and the recruiter is still involved in the scheduling process.

Veronica Caraballo (00:30:11):

Oh, yes, absolutely. The recruiter is very much involved in that recruiting process. I mean, as Jessica mentioned, and she said it perfectly, I mean human resources, we don't want to remove that human touch. So as Trudy is prescreening our candidates and before they're scheduled for an interview, our recruiters are reviewing that information. They're initiating that step to say, Hey, these are the candidates after prescreening. These are the candidates that I want to schedule for that interview. So our recruiters are just hand selecting the candidates that they feel meet the qualifications that we're looking for, the most qualified candidates for TruGreen, and really saving our team so much time at the end of the day. So they're going through moving candidates to the interview bucket. Recruiters are going to those interviews. They have fewer no-shows. The candidate's preparedness before the interview is absolutely amazing. Candidates already viewed our realistic job preview. They go in there with questions. They reviewed our frequently asked questions, benefits, all of that information. Trudy is able to take care of that, but we prepared that material. We actually told Trudy, when you schedule an interview, this is the information that we want to put out there. We actually created all of the communication the way that Trudy is presenting. We actually were the ones that hand selected all of that communication for the candidate. So it has that human touch along the way, which is great.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:31:45):

Yeah, it's very impressive. You can customize it down to the message, and I just think that this time to schedule is an incredible stat, so thanks for sharing. Before we jump into that scheduling process and a little bit deeper dive on that customized workflow, I hear a special person actually designed the Trudy avatar. Do you care to share with the group that little anecdote? I

Jessica Manucy (00:32:10):

Sure. My daughter actually drew Trudy for us, Veronica and I, before we ever started using Paradox, we were doing a little contest in TA with our team, and we essentially wanted kind of like a flat Stanley. Those of you with kids probably know what that is. So my daughter drew Trudy for us, and we were doing this thing where people would take her and take pictures of her in different scenarios. And so then when we started designing with Paradox and we needed an avatar, she was already kind of familiar to our team, and we had already kind of started using her in different places just because she would pop up in different areas, and we were like, let's see how Trudy works as our avatar. And now we use her all over the place. I mean, we have her in trainings. She's our signature on our email. She's like our little face of TruGreen and yeah, and I think my daughter was in seventh grade maybe when she drew that picture. Yeah,

Hayden Rodrigue (00:33:27):

It's adorable. It's adorable. I love popping up on the career site, seeing Trudy. It's very friendly, it's very engaging. It's very sweet. I love that little story beyond just the scheduling speed that we touched on the last slide, seven days versus one day. What other qualitative benefits have your recruiters experienced from Trudy handling the interview scheduling process? Oh,

Veronica Caraballo (00:33:59):

Sorry. Do you want

Jessica Manucy (00:34:01):

Me? No, no, you got that

Veronica Caraballo (00:34:02):

One. So some other qualitative, I'm so sorry I missed your question.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:34:14):

Oh, no worries. What were the qualitative benefits that your recruiters experienced besides just the seven days versus one day faster scheduling from Trudy handling the scheduling process?

Veronica Caraballo (00:34:26):

Oh, so while speed, of course was a major benefit of Trudy and interview scheduling capabilities, honestly, the impact on our recruiters were just as powerful. I mean, our recruiters were of course saving time throughout their day, really bringing down that time to fill from seven to one day. Just the way that paradox seamlessly integrates with our system. We wanted it to be the look and feel of working out of one system before. We were working out of multiple systems, which made it difficult for us to keep track of our candidates. We had to have a lot of manual trackers across the board. But since moving forward with Paradox and having Trudy really assist us there, we had fewer no-shows. Again, higher preparedness, increased recruiter satisfaction. So as the recruiters were going throughout their day, the interviews were scheduled, the candidates were ready, they had all the information upfront, so they were able to have conversations with the candidate improve that overall candidate experience, which is truly something that we were really focused on is that candidate experience. But overall, Trudy isn't just speeding up our process. She also really elevated the quality of our interactions across the board with our candidates and just again, that recruiter experience.

Jessica Manucy (00:35:58):

Very cool. Sorry, I was going to just also say I think our talent acquisition team is able to spend more time also with our hiring managers and understanding their needs and building those relationships as well. I think the more free time they have, the better those relationships get and the more time they're able to spend on that as well. So that's another added benefit that I just,

Hayden Rodrigue (00:36:22):

Yeah, you can build a true partnership with those hiring managers throughout the process. You have the time to be able to do that.

Jessica Manucy (00:36:29):

You

Hayden Rodrigue (00:36:29):

Touched briefly on kind of wanting to work out of one system and not having to train on a bunch of different systems, and you mentioned that you're working with Workday as your a TS. What were the main considerations and challenges you had when it came to integrating Paradox with Workday and how seamless is that data flow now?

Veronica Caraballo (00:36:49):

Yes. So one of our biggest challenges during the integration was truly creating something, as we mentioned earlier, that was seamless, a place that we centralized all of our information. So in our Workday system, we have multiple integrations with some of the well-known app cast. Indeed, we have all those integrations coming directly into our A TS system and then feed over to the Paradox system. So as we're moving candidates through the process, although our recruiters are not directly going into Paradox, just the fact that the information's feeding over there, and as we're toggling and moving our candidates throughout the process, paradox is just, it's hitting all of those different automations that we have set up in the backend. So recruiters are not toggling between multiple systems. We had to honestly peel back a lot of layers of our recruitment process. We were identifying some of the friction points.

(00:37:43):

What were some of the redundancies throughout our process gaps that impacted both the recruiter efficiency and the candidate experience. I know I say that a lot during the candidate experience, but that's why we're all here. We want to make sure that we're providing a positive candidate experience. So a major turning point was recognizing the need to configure our Workday setup. So with a strong collaboration between our Workday team and the Paradox team, we were able to redesign our integration strategy. So it's smoother, it's a more intelligent workflow across the board. So again, something that seems very seamless, so it doesn't have that look and feel as if you're working out of multiple systems, Trudy, from answering candidate questions to real time status updates. So as candidates are moving the process, completing the pre screener questions, scheduling interviews, it's quickly updating our Workday system so recruiters can really see live time updates of where their candidates are throughout the process.

(00:38:48):

So again, just really reducing some of that manual human error issues that come up throughout the process, especially if you're working out of multiple systems, you have a tracker. I think everyone resource is guilty of having probably multiple tabs of trackers that they're utilizing to have bits and pieces of information, but our process continues to evolve as technology evolves. Luckily, we get to experience some of those here now with Trudy and really utilizing you guys' system. We don't view this as a one-time fix, especially as things are changing. We're looking to explore AI and how else we can utilize it to the full capacity, but I feel like we've created a really great foundation for continuous improvement, ensuring that our system, our people, and the tools are all aligned to make sure that we're hiring top talent and candidates that will stay. So we're excited.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:39:49):

Sounds like you've streamlined that process quite a bit and very, very cool. Yes. Based off of all of that streamlining, here's a very impressive stat that I just wanted to share. 300,000 applications in one year with Trudy. That's a 300% increase year over year, and it sounds like conversational ai, this Workday integration, all of these pieces have come together to make a huge impact on your hiring process, and I just want to say congratulations to your team on creating this kind of process. It's very, very impressive to see that big of an increase year over year. There's another stat that we want to talk about, and this is the big one in the title of the webinar itself. There's $1.8 million that you guys saved in the course of 12 weeks with automation. Can you tell us a little bit more about the significant cost savings you achieved in such a short period of time and what the leadership response

Jessica Manucy (00:40:55):

Was? Yes. So we were able to get staffed this year without the use of the RPO, which is a significant part of the savings there. So we have also seen a better quality of candidate. We're able to move them through the process quickly. So we've seen improved turnover as well, which has decreased our need to hire additional people. That's saved us on advertising, spend, background checks. I mean, everything kind of gets impacted when you start hiring less people being more efficient, not meeting as many people to do the work. And I know when we initially talked about this, it was 1.8 in the first 12 weeks. So in the first six months of the year, I'll say it's now 2.4 million under where we were year over year from last year, which is, I mean, significant, right? Like I said, a lot of that came out of the labor line, but because we weren't using in R po, we were able to give our team some additional increases. So we did a little swap out there. We so far this year have saved over $300,000 just in background checks. Our advertising is 1.2 million underwear. It was last year. So all of these things add up, and right now our cost per hire as of the middle of the year is $76 under where it was last year. So it is significant. We've hired maybe about a thousand people less than we did last year at this time,

Hayden Rodrigue (00:42:54):

So they're staying a little bit longer as well. Yeah, that's impressive. That's really great to quantify all those numbers and then be able to use that as a business case of here's what we're actually accomplishing. Very impressive. Jessica looks frozen to me. Is she frozen to you? Veronica?

Veronica Caraballo (00:43:16):

I think, yes. She's also frozen.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:43:18):

Oh, no. Well, we can move on to the next slide and hopefully she'll catch up. But again, incredible, incredible work here. That's a very impressive number. That definitely adds up and makes a lot of impact. So this is your current hiring process. We've talked a lot about this throughout this call from the application to the screening to interview scheduling, all of that is handled by our conversational ai and then post that, it's got a lot of human touch points as well when it comes to measuring the quality of hire. Throughout this process. We just talked about it, you're $76 down per for hire. You're having to hire a thousand people less per year, which means the quality of that hire is sticking around longer, there's less turnover. Is there any other things that you measure for the impact of Trudy and the new career site when it comes to that quality of hire, especially regarding retention beyond the busy season?

Veronica Caraballo (00:44:25):

Yes, I know Jessica brought up some really great points, but honestly, the early retention. So we look at retention from the first 14 days. We look at it from the first 30, 60, 90 days. Our folks actually staying. Are they sticking after training? We have, depending on the role, our lawn specialists go through about a 10 day training similar to our sales associates. So are they sticking through the training when they first come in for day one? Do they have job readiness? Are they familiar with the role? Did they come in? We actually have a realistic job preview as well that folks can come in before they actually start, and they're able to get an idea of

(00:45:31):

How many offers that we're making at this point, year over year. We're constantly improving our overall process. A couple years ago, we were making offers and still hiring for a lot of our high volume positions through the October timeframe, which if you're in one of those areas that snows, sometimes that could be a bad thing because then shortly after, because of where seasonal, some of those folks will go in through seasonal active leave. So the fact that we're able to hire and fill all of our roles now by April, we're actually filling all of our roles. That just shows the retention, and that's the things that we're looking for and how we're really measuring the success there. I know Jessica, you just popped in, but I don't know if there's anything else that you would really like to add in terms of how we're measuring as well, the impact of Trudy, our new career site, and the quality of those hires.

Jessica Manucy (00:46:31):

You probably hit on everything. I was going to say, I'm so sorry. I don't know I, I'm having at t issues, but

Hayden Rodrigue (00:46:42):

No worries.

Jessica Manucy (00:46:43):

It just kicked me out. I hope it doesn't happen again. I think I jinxed myself earlier when I said this happened to me yesterday.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:46:52):

Wifi problems happen, especially when you're fully remote, so it make it No worries. You're back now. Cool. Very cool. That wraps up a lot of our general presentation and questions, but now I just want to just ask you both kind of an open-ended question. For all of the companies that are joining us today facing similar seasonal or high turnover challenges, what's your single most important piece of advice to 'em?

Jessica Manucy (00:47:24):

I would say take a look at your processes. Take a look at what's working, what's not working. Always keep the candidate in mind when you are making changes. I think that's the most important thing. If you don't have the right people, you don't have the people to do the work. So attracting the right people is super important. So look at your processes, determine what's working, see where you can make the impact in the smallest amount of time, spending the least amount of money. I mean, all these things are important to the company, and if you prioritize things and you look at what things can make a bigger impact to start with, get some of those small wins, then I think people are more inclined to let you do bigger things. So I think that's probably my biggest piece.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:48:34):

Nice. Veronica, anything you'd like to add?

Veronica Caraballo (00:48:37):

No, I mean, Jessica really said it perfectly. I mean, just think about that candidate experience. I know we said that throughout this, through this past hour, but not only that, think about the recruiter experience. Look at your overall process. How can you streamline the process to give time back in the day to your recruiter so they can have, again, those meaningful conversations with the candidate, but also connecting with their leadership team and just making sure that they're all aligned in what they're looking for moving forward.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:49:07):

Very nice. Well, thank you very much. I know we have a few questions from the chat that we will open up in a moment here. But before that, I just wanted to do a quick plug for another upcoming webinar that's coming up at the end of August that's more of a deeper dive into our career sites product in general. So you got a really great personalized story here from Veronica and Jessica today of the impact of conversational career sites, our scheduling tool, just paradoxes conversational AI capabilities in general. If you want a deeper dive into the product itself and would just like to learn a little bit more, join me, myself and our SVP of client engagement, Dave Hardin on August 27th, I believe for that more technical deep dive into the product and it's functionality. But now I believe we can open it up to any questions that we've had from the chat during this webinar. The first question I will bring up is how specifically has Trudy impacted your quality of hire? I guess we already kind of talked about that. Are there different questions you'd ask applicants with Trudy that you asking before she was implemented? That's another part of that same question. Did you change your approach to how you're screening candidates with Trudy versus how you're screening candidates with recruiters?

Jessica Manucy (00:50:40):

No. I think that she really just helps to identify who are the best candidates on the front end is really where the time savings is. She can ask some of those questions that are like, do you have a driver's license? Are you within a certain amount of radius of the branch where we need you to work? Or some of those front end questions that when you're looking at people's resumes, you may not be able to tell, especially if you're in a high volume situation and you have 300 applicants for one role. It is hard for sometimes for a talent acquisition partner to know where to start with that, right? Who's the best person? How do I sort this? So being able to ask some of those questions on the front end and identify who are these people that are truly qualified and people that we would want to have those conversations, conversations with is really where that savings comes in.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:51:46):

Totally. Another question. How hard and long did it take for you to configure Trudy to respond to candidates, how you wanted her to? What did that process look like?

Veronica Caraballo (00:51:58):

That's a great question. So honestly, I would say the paradox integration was one of the easiest integrations I've actually had to work on. So it wasn't hard to configure. I mean, I know our HRIS team worked directly on the configuration piece, and I know I partnered with them a lot on that, but honestly, as they were going through and getting that configuration piece done, it wasn't that hard. Paradox really provided us step-by-step guide and we were actually on multiple calls with their integration team or their integration and implementation team to really go through the process, walk them through before we even got to the implementation phase, we had went to Chicago and we did a full, I think a day or two of just mapping and designing out our full process. One thing that I really enjoyed is that they were very upfront and honest with us and told us what was possible with the paradox system and what was possible.

(00:53:00):

So we talked about all the in talent acquisition, we have a lot of ideas and we know what we want, and I really did enjoy those conversations early on of what was possible. So as we got into the implementation phase, we worked with experienced integration folks from the paradox side that just helped really design it. I think it took us from the time we completed design to before we started testing, I think honestly it took us about two to three weeks tops to build out the entire integration in our testing environment, and then we were able to test it out. We did about one or two weeks of testing, and then right after that, we trained all of our TA partners, and this is only for our high volume positions. I do want to throw that out there. We utilize Trudy for all of our high volume positions. Our corporate level positions are still managed through the Workday system, so I do want to throw that out there. We did this configuration with all of our high volume positions, but it was honestly such a seamless process and just easy to test. They gave us great test scripts that we went through, and it just worked exactly the way we had anticipated, and it wasn't a difficult process to really develop in the backend.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:54:19):

Nice. And then what was the career site design process on top of that? How did that go? What was your engagement with that team, and how simple was that process as well knowing that they will be managing it moving forward?

Veronica Caraballo (00:54:37):

Oh my gosh, honestly, it's a breath of fresh air. Before we had to manage our career site, which is great. I mean, hey, give us the access and we'll play around with it. But just having the Paradox team manage our career site, the design, the layout, just basically making our vision a reality was amazing. So in the backend, we really, myself and my entire team, we worked very hard for weeks just figuring out what we wanted and figuring out the vision and the direction we wanted to go with our career site. But once we met with the Paradox team, it literally took them only two weeks to build out our entire career page, and that includes us reviewing the information, making any tweaks to it, they allowed us time, they built it. I mean, we gave them the idea of it and just literally, I think it only took them three days to design our entire career page based off of what we were looking for and asking for.

(00:55:44):

Then they sent us over the information. We were able to review it, make any modifications that we were looking for, and it was literally, I never thought that a career, so I can take two weeks to build out and be ready to go, but they did such a phenomenal job. It was the last thing we did before we went live, and honestly, when we went live, everything was super seamless. I was a nervous wreck, like, oh my gosh, we're going live. There's a lot of stress that goes into a go live date. But there were just no hiccups in the process. Everything just worked as we anticipated. Just one thing I would mention, if you guys implement anything, make sure that you update your workday or whatever a TS system you're utilizing, make sure that you update it before you start testing and building anything in your test environment, because all of that stuff will roll over, but it was a seamless process really working with them to build out that career site.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:56:45):

Very cool. I think we have time for one more question. Are you currently using the Workday hired score product or does paradox capability cover the qualified versus non-qualified component? So

Jessica Manucy (00:56:58):

We are not using Hired Scored that we did look at that solution. It was not a good fit for us because being with the, most of the people that we hire don't have a resume or do not, I mean, we don't require that. It's a lot of general labor sale. We're very entry level with our roles. We are in the process right now of implementing tradify, which is through Paradox, which is an assessment tool that is going to help us identify, and again, another tool for our talent acquisition partners to be able to say these people are a preferred fit for this role. We've worked with the psychologists at Trade Deify. They've helped us identify these skill profiles. So we're really excited. We're going to be rolling that out in the next couple of weeks. So ultimately, we decided that was a better solution for

Hayden Rodrigue (00:58:00):

Us. Nice. Yeah, Tradify assessments, they're very fast. They're great for Frontline, they're great for high volume hiring because it's quick. It's like 90 seconds long, and you can really capture a lot about a person and their personality within that assessment as well. So very exciting to hear that you're implementing. I think we've got two minutes left if we have time for any more questions. I'm just looking to see if there's a new one

Veronica Caraballo (00:58:38):

When

Hayden Rodrigue (00:58:38):

You have, what was that?

Veronica Caraballo (00:58:41):

What was that? I saw a really good question from Amy. She said, how do you monitor how Trudy responds to candidates? Can you remove prompts or add prompts? Is it ever evolving? I just wanted to respond to that really quick. So yes, so with Trudy, we can manage the prompts. So of course we provide Trudy all of the information about our company. We provide all the benefit information. We provide any bit of piece of information that we feel is going to be important to the candidate experience, and Trudy will respond to those questions based off of the information we provided and just make it so natural and organic the way she's responding to. But if there's a certain question or a certain topic that we're like, Ooh, for this specifically, we only want her to respond this way, we can set that parameter around Trudy so we can tell her, if you get any questions about this topic, these keywords only respond this way. So we can set that up either way.

Hayden Rodrigue (00:59:42):

Very nice. Yeah, it gives you a lot of flexibility when it comes to changing things, monitoring responses, and then if you see something that you're like, oh, that's not quite what we would want to say to that candidate, you can always make that change, and you can always continue to evolve and change how Trudy's responding or talking to candidates. So I think that's a really great piece of just making sure that you're always evolving and improving upon the candidate engagement piece within the application process. Amazing. Well, thank you both. This has been an incredible conversation. I hope it's been enlightening to everybody who attended today. We're very excited about partnering with Tru Green and continuing to partner with you guys. You're doing incredible work. It's inspiring to be able to chat with you about just what you've been able to accomplish over the past year, and I'm excited to see what you guys continue to do. But thank you to everyone who attended today. Thank you again to Veronica and Jessica, and we will see you again soon and again, one more time. If you have any interest in a deeper dive into conversational career sites, just scan that QR code and it'll take you to registration for an upcoming webinar about a month from now. Thank you again for your time, and I hope you all have a great rest of your day. Talk soon.

Jessica Manucy (01:01:08):

Thanks for having us. Bye.

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Meet the speakers.

Jessica Manucy
Jessica Manucy
Head of Talent Acquisition, TruGreen

Strategic and innovative Talent Acquisition leader with extensive experience in developing, leading and optimizing an enterprise-wide TA function in the United States and globally.

Jessica Manucy
Jessica Manucy
Head of Talent Acquisition, TruGreen

Strategic and innovative Talent Acquisition leader with extensive experience in developing, leading and optimizing an enterprise-wide TA function in the United States and globally.

Veronica Caraballo
Veronica Caraballo
TA Operations Manager, TruGreen

Crafting and implementing comprehensive recruiting strategies that enable our regions to flourish during busy seasons and navigate business changes.

Explore how Olivia adapts to the way you work.
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Webinar

Seasonal hiring solved: TruGreen's million dollar breakthrough.

Jul 24, 2025
11 AM CDT
Can't attend live? No worries — register, and you'll get the recording after the webinar.

Powering growth with AI:

TruGreen reimagined their career site and saved $1,800,000 in 12 weeks. Those results are so good they can stand on their own. But if you’re curious to learn how they did it, join us on July 24th.

Speakers:

Jessica Manucy
Jessica Manucy
Head of Talent Acquisition, TruGreen
Veronica Caraballo
Veronica Caraballo
TA Operations Manager, TruGreen

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