Crystal Finishing Systems, Inc.

Intro/Overview

Crystal Finishing Systems, a service manufacturing company with four U.S. locations, needed to keep up with fast-growing hiring demands while helping recruiters review and prioritize applications more efficiently. With hiring volume rising sharply and limited recruiting capacity across a wide range of roles, the company turned to Indeed Smart Screening to help identify stronger-fit candidates faster and make earlier, more confident hiring decisions.

Crystal Finishing Systems now uses Smart Screening to speed up resume review, provide insights to explore in interviews, and prioritize candidates more effectively.

Since implementation in January 2026, the team has reduced screening time dramatically, improved candidate response rates, and increased interview-to-hire rates.

Background

Crystal Finishing Systems is a service manufacturing company founded in 1993. The company supports other businesses that need external manufacturing capacity, providing services ranging from aluminum extrusion and fabrication to coatings and plastics. It operates across four locations in the United States, with three branches in Wisconsin and one in Mississippi.

The company hires for a wide variety of roles, from entry-level production positions to supervisors, managers, engineers, HR roles, and executive leadership positions. According to Alexis Eaton, Talent Acquisition Business Partner, at Crystal Finishing Systems, that breadth makes hiring especially complex because the team is not filling just one type of role, it is supporting every part of the business. That complexity has grown alongside demand. Crystal Finishing Systems reported a 40% increase in work volume year over year and was managing 133 open positions at the time of the interview. The recruiting function itself consists of Alexis and two recruiters.

The Challenge: Too much manual screening, less time for proactive hiring

Before Smart Screening, Crystal Finishing Systems spent a significant amount of time manually reviewing applications and trying to gather missing candidate information. Alexis shared that the company was receiving approximately 40 to 60 applicants a week before Smart Screening, but many candidates had incomplete applications or no resume attached, forcing the team to spend time chasing down information before they could determine fit.

Building a strong candidate pipeline was challenging. Alexis explained that the company could only reach about 65% of applicants, making it harder for the team to build a consistent pipeline of qualified, interested candidates. This also added significant time and effort for the recruiting team. Alexis estimated that before Smart Screening, recruiters were spending roughly half of a 40-hour work week on resume review and early screening activities. Across the team, that manual effort limited their ability to be more strategic and slowed progress across hiring.

The challenge was especially acute for hard-to-fill technical roles. Because Crystal Finishing Systems is located in northern Wisconsin, engineering talent can be difficult to attract, and the company competes in a market where staffing agencies actively target those candidates. Roles such as quality engineer and manufacturing engineer had remained open for long periods despite repeated interviewing activity.

"Smart Screening has allowed not only our HR team to get better at really digging into the backgrounds, but it provides such great guidance for our supervisors who are interviewing these team members."

Alexis Eaton,, Talent Acquisition Business Partner
Crystal Finishing Systems, Inc.

The Solution: Smart Screening helps the team prioritize, guide interviews, and move faster

Crystal Finishing Systems adopted Indeed Smart Screening to improve how it reviews and prioritizes candidates. The team uses Smart Screening to define what a strong candidate looks like for different roles, then uses those criteria to identify which candidates should be prioritized first.

For Alexis, one of the biggest benefits is how Smart Screening supports not only recruiters but also hiring leaders and supervisors involved in interviews. The highlights and flagged-for-follow-up sections help interviewers understand both what to explore as strengths and what to validate more closely, which is especially useful for newer supervisors who are still learning the hiring process.

The team also uses scoring thresholds to guide prioritization. After working with departments to define baseline requirements, recruiters learned where strong-fit candidates tend to score and now give priority to applicants above those thresholds. For some highly skilled roles, that threshold is above 85%. In one example, two engineering hires who scored 87 and 92 were identified as strong matches and quickly moved forward.

The Results: Faster screening, stronger hiring outcomes

Crystal Finishing Systems has seen measurable improvements in hiring efficiency, candidate quality and downstream outcomes since implementing Smart Screening. The most immediate improvement has been time savings. Alexis shared that Smart Screening reduced screening from roughly half of each recruiter’s work week to about an hour a day across the team. She later estimated that across three recruiters, the company is saving about 60 hours per week.

That time savings has helped the team move faster. Alexis shared that time from application to first review has decreased from about 72 hours to 24 hours or less. She also noted that a Director level role was filled within two weeks, and two long-open engineering roles were successfully closed after the team used Smart Screening to refine requirements and prioritize candidates who clearly met their threshold for success.

Smart Screening has helped Crystal Finishing Systems create clearer benchmarks for candidate quality. Working with department specific requirements, the team established a baseline for acceptable candidates, with strong candidates typically not falling below a 70% Smart Screening score.

The team has also gained a faster way to prioritize top talent. Internally, Crystal Finishing Systems defines strong fit candidates as those scoring above 85%, and those candidates move past initial review 99% of the time. Alexis shared that these higher scoring candidates tend to be more responsive to interview requests and more consistently meet the expectations of the role.

That earlier prioritization is improving outreach speed as well. Alexis concluded that when recruiters now send interview invites by text or email, responses often come back the same day or by the next morning, and candidate drop-off has declined. The team also reports that higher matched candidates are significantly more likely to respond to interview requests within two to four hours, helping recruiters move promising talent through the funnel much faster. She noted that about 70% of applications the company used to reject were due to an inability to reach the candidate, making this a meaningful improvement.

The impact continues into later hiring stages. Alexis shared that, among candidates who move past initial review, the hire rate is now 84% across the company, compared with an estimated 60% previously. According to the team, higher matched candidates are also significantly more likely to progress beyond the initial screening process to an in-person interview, often leading to a hire. Alexis added that most areas are now seeing an in-person interview-to-hire rate of 86%, compared with an estimated 40% previously. That shift reflects a more qualified pool moving into interviews and fewer wasted conversations with candidates who are unlikely to receive offers.

The company has also seen signs of stronger candidate quality and retention. Alexis stated Smart Screening helped the team define what a good candidate looks like and take some of the guesswork out of evaluation. In one facility, turnover improved from 46% to 22%, and in the most recent month discussed during the interview, it was down to 2.9%. Alexis attributed that improvement to being better able to identify stronger fit candidates earlier in the process.

At the same time, applicant flow has expanded substantially. Crystal Finishing Systems now averages about 250 applications per week, up from 40 to 60 prior to Smart Screening and Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Alexis also noted that candidate quality improved enough that the team created a separate entry-level production posting to ensure it continued attracting first time workers, rather than losing them in a pool increasingly filled with more experienced applicants. This gave Crystal Finishing Systems a more intentional way to segment hiring needs by experience level and maintain quality across both entry-level and skilled roles.

Together, these outcomes show how Smart Screening is helping Crystal Finishing Systems spend less time screening, identify stronger fit candidates earlier, and move the right talent forward with more speed and confidence.