Shawmut consolidates construction recruiting around one flexible platform

Challenge

Craig Stevens has led talent acquisition at Shawmut Design and Construction for more than 10 years. Shawmut is a 100% employee-owned construction manager with 13 offices including in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, and project teams wherever the work takes them.

Craig's team hires the professional leaders who run those projects: project managers, superintendents, and estimators. These have been among the hardest roles to fill in the U.S. for two decades, and Shawmut's portfolio makes them harder. The same roles look different on a life sciences build, a university or K-12 school, a hotel, or a corporate campus. They also look different in Boston than they do in Los Angeles.

That variety broke Shawmut’s single-channel strategy. Job postings stalled in some markets. Cold calling worked in others. LinkedIn worked only in limited cases, and strong candidates were fielding six or seven recruiter messages at a time.

"In some markets job postings don't work. In others it's cold calling or referrals, and LinkedIn only works in limited cases. Nothing works for everyone, so we needed something flexible enough to work across every role and every geography."

Outside of employee referrals, the team was trying a long list of tactics that never added up to a system. Craig set a bigger goal than adding one more tool. He wanted to know if Shawmut could find one platform and make it the primary toolkit for every recruiter.

"I was challenging myself to figure out how we could reduce our reliance on LinkedIn. I wanted one primary tool that could bring our CRM, our ATS, and our sourcing into the same place."

The ATS was part of the problem. Thousands of past applicants sat in ICIMS, but the platform was difficult to source in and hard to rediscover candidates from. Craig wanted historical data working for his recruiters, alongside a warm pipeline that would take pressure off their outreach.

Solution

Testing the fit with Shaker

Craig is always researching new recruiting tools. When Findem came onto his radar, he brought it to Shaker Recruitment Marketing, Shawmut's recruitment marketing partner, to help assess whether it could work for his roles. Shaker supported the evaluation and the trial that followed.

But Craig was skeptical. For years, nothing had beaten his recruiters picking up the phone. What changed his view during the trial was how Findem engaged with his team’s most difficult roles. When something didn't match his expectations, Findem worked through it with him instead of brushing it off.

"I'd been skeptical of every solution that promised more than cold calling. During the trial, the Findem team dug into our hardest roles with us and showed us what the platform could actually do for them."

One platform, many ways in

Shawmut brought in the Findem platform to consolidate tools that had never worked together. The team moved its existing CRM into Findem's Talent CRM and connected ICIMS, a Findem partner, through Findem's ATS integration, which made it possible to search and rediscover candidates the ATS had buried.

The bigger shift was flexibility. Recruiters covering different regions and specialties each found their own path in: some run campaigns, some source directly, some work rediscovery. Because Shawmut's recruiters move between markets as demand shifts, one shared platform travels with them.

"Our ATS was hard to source in and even harder to rediscover candidates from. Now those past applicants are back in play, and work that used to live in separate systems is consolidated in one platform."

Adoption built around a busy team

The pilot ran into a real-world problem: the team was too busy to fully adopt and implement it in just 30 or 60 days. Findem extended the pilot and added seats so the right recruiters could get hands-on time.

After rollout, Shawmut and Findem ran a contest focused on campaigns, with prizes the recruiters picked themselves. Winners were recognized for completing real steps in the hiring process: creating a campaign template, generating an interested candidate, converting a prospect to an interviewee in ICIMS, re-engaging a candidate from the CRM, and taking an AI-written campaign and making it human with a Team Overview.

The contest ran through summer vacations, but it got the team using the platform and showed them what else was possible.

"We were trying to change a behavior. The contest got recruiters building campaigns and seeing that there's something else out there beyond posting and calling."

Craig is already planning a fast-follow contest timed for a stretch when everyone is in the office.

Findem's customer success team stayed close through every stage of rollout. Early on that meant weekly calls with Craig, quick answers to questions, and short working sessions whenever something came up.

The team also built relationships with each recruiter and coached them based on the roles and markets they actually cover. When a recruiter needs to try something new, Craig sends them to the CS team instead of a training manual.

"Recruiters are busy. They're not going to go read the manual or watch the training. Having a team that listens, understands our business, takes accountability, and helps each recruiter figure out what to do differently is one of the best aspects of the platform."

Shawmut is early in its journey, and the next goal is clear: win more on rediscovery across thousands of past applicants while building on the campaign habits the contest started.

"Rediscovery is where I want to win. We have thousands and thousands of applicants already in our ATS, and Findem finally gives us a way to act on them."