Director of Talent Acquisition in St. Charles, Illinois at Healthcare Linen Services Group
Explore Related Opportunities
Job Description
Position Overview:
Healthcare Linen Services Group (HLSG) is a leading provider of mission-critical healthcare linen management services, operating processing plants across the Midwest, Central, and South-Central United States through a family of premier regional brands. HLSG has grown rapidly through both organic expansion and acquisition, and that growth depends on one capability above all others: the ability to staff plants and routes faster, better, and more cost-effectively than the market.
HLSG is seeking a Director of Talent Acquisition to rebuild that capability. This is a redesign of an existing department rather than the assumption of an established function. The Director serves as the process owner and single point of accountability for full-cycle recruitment within a defined initial scope—beginning with one region—covering how a requisition is opened and approved, to how and where a position is written and posted, to how applicant flow is generated and converted, through screening, interviewing, offer, acceptance, and start. Reporting to the Vice President of Human Resources, the Director is charged with designing and proving a disciplined, in-house talent acquisition model that can be extended as results warrant and systematically reducing the Company’s overtime and the Company’s reliance on third-party recruiting agencies and the fees that come with them.
Why Join Healthcare Linen Services Group?
This is a build role, not a caretaker role. The Director of Talent Acquisition has the mandate and the autonomy to design the recruiting funnel, configure the technology, define the standards, and write the playbook that will govern how HLSG hires. In a high-volume production and route-service environment, hiring is not a support function—it is the constraint on plant throughput, service reliability, and growth, and this role owns removing it. HLSG is a six-time Great Place to Work–certified employer, and this position directly shapes whether that reputation reaches the labor market in every plant community the Company serves.
Compensation & Incentive Structure:
Compensation for this role reflects the scope of functional design and build responsibility, with incentive opportunity tied directly to measurable hiring performance.
- Annual performance incentive of up to 20% of base salary, tied to time-to-fill, plant staffing levels, cost-per-hire and agency spend reduction, and retention of new hires.
- Incentive achievement is measured against clearly defined annual targets and paid based on results.
Primary Duties and Responsibilities[1]
- Own full-cycle recruitment end-to-end—high-volume production and washroom roles, route service drivers, maintenance and engineering, plant supervision and management, and corporate and leadership positions.
- Build and execute the roadmap to bring recruiting in-house, systematically reducing dependence on third-party agencies and staffing vendors and eliminating avoidable placement and markup costs.
- Directly source and recruit plant leadership, corporate, and hard-to-fill professional positions rather than routing them to outside firms.
- Establish requisition intake, approval, and prioritization standards so that plant managers, HR site staff, and recruiters all operate from one documented, enforceable process.
- Define service-level agreements at every stage—intake to posting, application to first response, screen to interview, interview to offer, offer to start date—and hold the function accountable to them.
- Document the recruiting model as a repeatable playbook that can be extended to additional brands and plants once it is proven.
- Audit how positions are currently written, posted, and distributed across brands and locations; rebuild postings for search visibility, clarity, shift and pay transparency, compliance, and conversion.
- Own the career site, job board mix, and sourcing channel strategy; evaluate every channel on qualified-applicant and hire yield rather than raw application volume.
- Design and manage a defined recruiting funnel—applied, screened, interviewed, offered, accepted, started, retained at 90 days—with conversion targets and drop-off diagnostics at each stage.
- Remove candidate friction in a hourly, high-volume market: application length and completion rate, mobile accessibility, speed of first contact, interview and tour scheduling, background and drug screening turnaround, and offer response time.
- Ensure sourcing, postings, and screening reach the full local labor pool in each plant community, including bilingual and Spanish-language applicant flow where market demographics warrant.
- Build and maintain talent pipelines and evergreen requisitions for continuously recurring roles so that second and third shift, weekend, and seasonal staffing is proactive rather than reactive.
- Own the applicant tracking system end-to-end—configuration, workflow design, data integrity, user adoption, and reporting—and lead the evaluation, implementation, or optimization of recruiting technology.
- Establish the standard recruiting metrics package: time-to-fill, time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, source of hire, funnel conversion, offer acceptance rate, requisition aging, open positions by plant and shift, agency spend, and 30/60/90-day new hire retention.
- Deliver reporting to plant, regional, and executive leadership on a fixed cadence, and use the data to reallocate advertising spend and recruiter effort toward what actually produces hires.
- Partner with Operations and Finance to forecast hiring demand tied to volume growth, new customer onboarding, plant expansions, acquisitions, seasonality, and attrition.
- Partner with plant managers, regional operations leadership, site HR, and corporate department heads to translate production volume and attrition into concrete, staffed workforce plans by location and shift.
- Support plant expansions, new customer start-ups, and acquisition integrations with staffing ramp plans that ensure operations are fully staffed and trained at go-live.
- Advise and train hiring managers on structured interviewing, selection criteria, and calibration to improve quality of hire and the defensibility of hiring decisions.
- Own employer branding and candidate engagement across the career site, job boards, social channels, employer review platforms, and the employee referral program—building recognition both for HLSG and for the regional brands candidates know locally.
- Build a referral engine that converts the existing workforce into a primary, low-cost sourcing channel in plant communities within scope.
- Develop local market presence through hiring events, community partnerships, workforce boards, technical schools, and CDL programs.
- Monitor and improve the candidate experience at every touchpoint, including how non-selected and declined candidates are handled, to protect the Company’s reputation as an employer of choice.
- Define the future-state recruiting productivity standards, requisition loads, and performance expectations—and lead any recruiting staff assigned to the function as it is built.
- Provide direction and coaching to plant-level HR and hiring staff who execute recruiting locally, ensuring consistent practice.
- Recommend recruiting headcount and structure beyond the initial scope based on demonstrated results, making disciplined build-versus-buy decisions on capacity rather than assuming a team is warranted.
- Partner with HR and Operations on the handoff from offer accepted to first day worked so the process does not break at onboarding, orientation, or first-week training.
- Ensure compliance with all federal, state, and local employment laws and regulations throughout sourcing, selection, and hiring, including applicant tracking, record-keeping, I-9 and work authorization, and documentation requirements.
- Partner with HR, Legal, and Operations on background screening, drug screening, motor vehicle record checks, and Department of Transportation requirements for driver positions so that candidates are cleared and road-eligible without stalling the funnel.
- Maintain consistent, documented selection standards that reduce hiring risk and support defensible employment decisions.
- Manage the recruitment budget in partnership with HR and Finance leadership across job boards, advertising, recruitment marketing, technology, and any remaining agency or temporary staffing spend.
- Negotiate and manage vendor contracts, rates, and service levels; hold partners accountable to performance or exit the relationship.
- Set ambitious, measurable objectives for the talent acquisition function and review progress against key performance indicators on a defined cadence.
- Reduce internal turnover by improving selection quality, role clarity at point of hire, and the accuracy of what candidates are told about shift, environment, and physical demands before they accept.
- Identify and remove barriers to hiring speed, ensuring resource alignment and efficiency in achieving staffing goals.
- Uphold ethics, integrity, and compliance, reinforcing the Company’s commitment to its core values.
Job Requirements:
Preferred Qualifications:
First-Year Measures of Success:
EEO Statement: Healthcare Linen Services Group is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.
[1] DISCLAIMER: This is not necessarily an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties, skills, efforts, requirements or working conditions associated with the job. While this is intended to be an accurate reflection of the current job, management reserves the right to revise the job or to require that other or different tasks be performed as assigned.