See how Jamestown Container replaced seven staffing agencies with one WAE partnership, cutting payroll time 50% and filling roles in under a week
Jamestown Container, a manufacturer of corrugated packaging, spent years relying on a patchwork of six to seven staffing agencies to keep its production floor running. The arrangement was costly and unreliable: inconsistent candidates, high turnover, and an HR team buried in administrative work instead of running the business. After partnering with WAE, Jamestown Container consolidated its entire staffing operation onto a single platform with one dedicated account manager. The result was a 50% reduction in payroll processing time, a time-to-fill of under a week, and a turnover problem that went from a daily headache to barely a conversation.
Jamestown Container designs and manufactures corrugated packaging. Like most manufacturers, the company’s output depends directly on having enough people on the floor to run the machines which means its production schedule is only as strong as its temporary workforce. Jamestown Container’s main goal was simple to state and hard to execute: keep positions filled quickly, with people capable of producing at the same quality level as its long-term staff, without the constant administrative drag of managing that labor pool.
For years, meeting their staffing goals meant working with six to seven different staffing agencies at once. Each agency had its own recruiters, its own rates, and its own process, and none of them had a full picture of what Jamestown Container actually needed
The same candidates rotated through multiple agencies without ever building a real relationship with the company, and the quality showed it; workers who were less engaged and less reliable than the standard Jamestown Container was trying to hold to.
That instability was expensive in ways that went beyond the agency invoices. Every associate who went through a full round of onboarding and safety training and then didn’t return represented real, sunk cost. And the burden of coordinating it all fell squarely on HR: sending emails to multiple agencies for every open role, fielding resumes and recruiters that often didn’t fit, and manually logging into a different website for every agency just to approve hours each week.
Turnover compounded the problem. “There was significant turnover before WAE,” Jen said. “When all of that effort and energy goes into the candidates and they don’t work out, that significantly sets us back.” For a company that runs on production schedules, that kind of instability wasn’t just an HR problem, it was an operational one.
-Jen Ayotte,
HR Manager, Jamestown Container
Jamestown Container didn’t replace its staffing relationships when it brought on WAE, it centralized them. Instead of managing seven separate agency relationships, the company moved to a single platform with one dedicated account manager overseeing the entire process.
Consolidation changed the day-to-day mechanics of hiring
WAE replaced guesswork with data: rather than relying on a resume and a candidate’s word that they’d show up, Jamestown Container now has access to a reliability score built from each worker’s actual performance history across the platform. “The technology that WAE provides gives us a reliability score that is incredibly accurate.” says HR Manager Jen Ayotte. “That has really helped us to be more confident in the employees that WAE sends us, because they have the data to back up what they’re sending.”
The transition itself was hands-on rather than self-service.
-Alexis Ennis,
HR Coordinator, Jamestown Container
WAE helped Jamestown Container cut payroll processing time by 50%, reduce time-to-fill from an open-ended, multi-agency process to under a week, and consolidate seven agencies into one centralized partnership
Alexis Ennis, HR Coordinator, put it plainly: what used to mean logging into several different agency websites every Monday to approve hours is now a single platform with no emails, no duplicate systems. “I can go through and approve time cards quickly, and it has easily reduced payroll time by 50%” says Ennis
Time-to-fill improved just as sharply. Jamestown Container now typically has a candidate working within a few days of a request, down from a process that could stretch on through multiple rounds of emails with no guaranteed timeline.
Turnover, once described as one of the HR department’s biggest headaches, has been “greatly reduced” according to Ennis, to the point that it’s no longer a significant concern day to day.
The time recovered from administrative work didn’t disappear, it moved to higher-value priorities. Kristen Erwin, General Manager, noted that her HR team has used the freed-up time to work on safety processes, pursue grants for additional training, and build out apprenticeship programs. Jen added that the team now has more room to invest in company culture and community engagement, work that had previously been crowded out by agency management.
Every person interviewed pointed to the same underlying shift: WAE isn’t treated as a vendor, but as an extension of the team, someone invested in Jamestown Container’s outcomes, not just its contract.
Asked whether they’d recommend WAE to another manufacturer, the answer from every person interviewed was the same: without hesitation.
