2015

AgCareers.com: a Vision to Drive the Talent Pipeline

Bonnie Johnson

More than ten years ago, Eric Spell saw that the agricultural industry needed to raise the bar on recruitment practices in order to drive the talent pipeline. In the early 2000s, Monster.com, CareerBuilder and other job boards started to pop up on the internet. “That is when the light bulb in my head started flashing and I went to work designing a website for online recruitment in agriculture,” shared Spell, President of AgCareers.com.

Eric Spell

THE BEGINNING

Spell grew up on a farm in North Carolina and received a degree in business management from North Carolina State University with a concentration in labor/personnel. In college he became fascinated with campus recruiters and thought, “What a cool job!” After going through many interviews, he had narrowed his options down to a large commodity company and a pork production company. In the late 80s, there was a lot beginning to happen in the swine industry. Spell didn’t have a good handle on pig production, but several of his mentors coached him to consider it.

Spell started with Murphy Farms (now Murphy-Brown, LLC) in their management trainee program. At that time companies were realizing they had to go where pig production was established to recruit students. Spell was in a recruitment class with new grads from all over the Midwest. The Southeast understood large-scale poultry production, but contract pig production was in its infancy there. Spell worked in sow production for a year, then a multiplication role working with contract growers. “Things were happening so fast, I was getting a lot of exposure and building excitement with the swine industry,” said Spell.

He was presented with an opportunity to help in a high school and collegiate recruitment capacity, which included traveling to 25 land-grant institutions to help support growth. That is when Spell realized that they were giving new grads the technical skills they needed, but not providing them with leadership skills. Spell was sent to England for a 60-day intensive leadership training course. When returning to the U.S. he was asked, “How do we implement this?” He suggested recruiting an experienced person from the leadership training organization to come work with Murphy Farms. After this professional was hired, Spell worked with them from the top down to identify the culture they wanted and the leadership components they needed. Then they developed a series of training programs for employees and began implementing them throughout the organization.

ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT

By the end of 1996, Spell caught the entrepreneurial bug. He left Murphy Farms to start his own training and consulting business, Potential Solutions.

Murphy Farms was his first client and he took on work for many other swine industry companies. At this point he mainly focused on training, but also did some recruitment consulting. This is when the boom of online job boards began and Spell developed his vision for an online recruitment tool to raise the bar in agriculture.

JobHog.net was launched in 2001. The name was developed at a time when businesses were being creative in naming internet companies, oftentimes with names that didn’t seem to fit with their business role (e.g. Amazon.com). Spell said, “The idea was that we were going to ‘hog’ all of the jobs in agriculture,” being a one-stop shop. However, some customers had the misconception that JobHog was only for swine jobs.

ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT

By the end of 1996, Spell caught the entrepreneurial bug. He left Murphy Farms to start his own training and consulting business, Potential Solutions.

Murphy Farms was his first client and he took on work for many other swine industry companies. At this point he mainly focused on training, but also did some recruitment consulting. This is when the boom of online job boards began and Spell developed his vision for an online recruitment tool to raise the bar in agriculture.

JobHog.net was launched in 2001. The name was developed at a time when businesses were being creative in naming internet companies, oftentimes with names that didn’t seem to fit with their business role (e.g. Amazon.com). Spell said, “The idea was that we were going to ‘hog’ all of the jobs in agriculture,” being a one-stop shop. However, some customers had the misconception that JobHog was only for swine jobs.

BECOMING AGCAREERS.COM

Student AmbassadorsIn 2002, Spell met the Farms.com group at the World Pork Expo. Farms.com already had a section of their site called AgCareers. com, which was more Canadian and recruiter based, and they were working on morphing their print newsletter into more of an online presence. On the other hand, JobHog was more focused on employers in the U.S., and a collaboration seemed like a perfect fit. The companies officially merged at the end of 2003 and today’s AgCareers.com was born.

Spell’s original business plan included the online job postings, student ambassadors and a roundtable conference. He had attended a swine industry roundtable event and knew that an ag industry-wide human resources roundtable would be beneficial for the industry. The North American Roundtable has grown to become the premier education and networking event in the agricultural industry, with record-breaking attendance of more than 230 human resource professionals, university and college career services staff and industry association representatives at the last event.

The online job board aspect of AgCareers.com has experienced tremendous growth since it began, with more than 65,000 jobs posted worldwide in 2014.

Spell’s vision for student ambassadors was born when he recognized “there was a lot of variation in on-campus recruitment processes and if companies didn’t have their act together, it hurt more than helped.” The AgCareers.com Campus Ambassador program is in its 11th year and rotates across several colleges and universities which have strong ag programs. Students act as a liaison between AgCareers.com and AgCareers. com’s partnership clients and the student body at their individual institutions.

THE FUTURE OF RECRUITMENT

AgCareers.com and Spell continue to help educate and encourage ag employers to raise the bar in recruitment. “Today’s college students grew up with contract swine farms and are familiar with the value,” shared Spell. “We’ve done a good job of encouraging and recruiting them to production, but we now see a candidate deficit in swine nutritionists, veterinarians, researchers and meat quality specialists. We need to do more to draw young people into those fields. Retirement is a concern; how do we help this new generation of workers be part of succession planning?” added Spell.

“We now see a candidate deficit in swine nutritionists, veterinarians, researchers and meat quality specialists. We need to do more to draw young people into those fields.”

AgCareers.com’s commitment to the swine industry in particular has led to special projects such as the Employee Compensation in Pork Production study for the National Pork Board. This survey evaluated salaries and benefits within the pork industry to provide an additional tool to elevate the image of careers in the swine industry and the level of talent entering the workforce.

The Ag Warriors program was also launched to assist military men and women in the search of careers within the ag and food industries. The program opens the door for both employers and veterans to connect. Spell has seen firsthand how military veterans develop into top performers in the ag industry, especially in pork production.

Spell’s vision for AgCareers.com started from his personal experiences in the pork production industry. AgCareers.com has grown to become the leading ag-specific job board for recruitment advertising and the foremost human resources service provider for the industry. AgCareers. com launched a brand-new site design in December 2014 to continue on the forefront of online recruitment. Elevating the recruitment methods and perception of the agricultural industry overall is a continuous process. As Spell has said, “American agriculture not only feeds the world with food, we need to feed the world with talent!”


- Bonnie Johnson
Bonnie Johnson is a Marketing Associate with AgCareers.com, the leading online career site and human resource service provider for the agricultural and food industries. In her role, she supports the AgCareers.com team and brand through marketing and communications efforts. This includes internal and external communications, email marketing, company branding and market research projects. Bonnie was raised on a farm in Northeast Iowa. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Northern Iowa and her Masters from Iowa State University. Bonnie has worked in marketing for 15 years and has been with AgCareers.com since 2010.