Lee Enterprises Selects Redmatch to Unify Employee Recruitment Process in 23 States

Redmatch, a recruitment software company, announced today that premier publisher Lee Enterprises is implementing Redmatch Recruiter for its 58 daily newspaper operations and other publishing and online subsidiaries.

Having already successfully implemented Redmatch Recruiter in five of its daily newspapers, Lee intends to expand the software implementation to its operations in 23 states, from New York to Hawaii, in order to leverage economies of scale across the organization. Having recently grown from a company of 4,000 to 12,000 employees in the short span of three years, Lee needed a recruiting solution that would accommodate their rapidly growing workforce.

Many of the other recruitment software solutions we looked at were designed for large-scale companies, but they were so cumbersome and difficult to use that it would have been a burden to implement in a mid-sized firm like ours, said Vito Kuraitis, Lee’s Vice President of Human Resources. We needed an intuitive and user-friendly system that our internal employees would embrace.

Redmatch Recruiter helps Lee get an organization-wide view of what is happening in its recruitment, firm-wide. If a candidate applies for a position in, for example, The Montana Standard in Butte, the HR administrator for The Billings (Montana) Gazette would be able to view and consider that same applicant. And HR staff at Lee Corporate can view the recruitment situation in both subsidiaries at a glance.

In the newspaper industry, relocation, almost by definition, is crucial to advancement. A lot of people working in the field start out at a smaller paper and then trade up to bigger ones, Kuraitis said. Being able to share applicant information across a wide radius population greatly improves our recruitment process.

Furthermore, Redmatch’s online recruitment system offers internal employees the opportunity for internal mobility. One of our key concerns is to nurture employee development and achievement, Kuraitis said. Redmatch’s internal database gives our employees the chance to advance their careers within Lee, and gives us the ability to maintain good employees within the ever-growing Lee network.

Easy, Flexible Solution Leads to Quick Adoption

Lee’s decision to implement Redmatch Recruiter organization-wide took place after a three-month trial at the Lincoln Journal Star, one of Lee’s daily newspapers. Being located in a university town, the Lincoln Journal Star’s HR administrator Shawna Hilbert had been overwhelmed by the paper generated from the near-constant flow of walk-in applicants. Automating our HR processes dramatically minimized the paper flow.

The relative ease of the implementation process at the Lincoln Journal Star was a turning point in Lee’s decision. In contrast to their competitors, the Redmatch solution was flexible enough to fit to our existing recruitment process, Kuraitis said. Implementation has been smooth and easy for both recruitment personnel and employees. The flexibility and user-friendliness of the system was a major factor in our decision to choose Redmatch.