HR Companies & HR Consultants in Cedar Rapids, IA

Skywalk Group is a Cedar Rapids, Iowa firm that pairs recruitment process outsourcing with human resources consulting and workforce training.

Although it is headquartered in eastern Iowa, its client base is national: the company says it has served organizations in over forty different industries, and that its client list expanded from about 275 to more than 850 during a recent five-year period.

Its work is organized around three goals for employers: bringing in capable people, preparing them well, and keeping them on staff.

Recruiting and RPO

The firm's core offering is OnRecruit®, a trademarked RPO program it introduced in 2010 as an evolution of its earlier contract recruiting model. Engagements are billed on an hourly basis, and the scope can be sized up or down depending on what a client requires. Buyers can choose among three levels of involvement:

• On-demand recruiting for specific time periods, projects or individual positions
• Partial recruiting, where one recruiter or a selected team handles certain stages, roles, regions or functions
• Fully outsourced recruiting, where Skywalk designs and runs the whole talent acquisition effort

Within these engagements the team can handle compensation and labor market analysis, pipeline building, sourcing of active and passive candidates, customized screening and interviews, reference checks, and pre-hire assessments that may include personality and skills testing, criminal background checks and drug tests. It also supports employee referral programs, workforce planning, offer communication and new-hire onboarding.

Since 2020 the company reports roughly 6,950 placements for about 300 companies in 33 states, with an average of 76 days to fill a role. It also states that clients have seen hiring costs fall by 40 to 60 percent and time-to-hire shorten by around 20 percent.

HR Consulting and Training

On the HR side, Skywalk can work next to an existing internal team or serve as a company's entire outsourced HR function, tailoring the arrangement to each client. The firm positions this service for organizations whose policies and procedures are incomplete, which can lead to hiring inefficiencies, poorly managed staff, workplace conflict and legal exposure.

One insurance client credits the team with helping it build HR and payroll operations from the ground up. Separately, the company provides custom training for leaders, managers and individual employees.

Industries Served

• Agriculture
• Banking and finance
• Construction
• Education, including special education cooperatives
• Healthcare and IDD organizations
• Manufacturing
• Renewable energy
• Telecommunications
• Transportation and logistics

Background

The business was started in 2003 under the name Human Capital Solutions by Elizabeth Trcka and Tami Young, who had previously worked at McLeodUSA, a Fortune 500 telecom they helped scale from five employees to more than 11,000, at one point hiring hundreds of people each week.

Beginning in a small Coralville office with a focus on small and mid-sized Midwestern employers, the firm moved to Cedar Rapids in 2007 and adopted the Skywalk Group name in 2008, a year when flooding forced staff to operate temporarily from a local bowling alley. After two further moves it settled in its downtown Cedar Rapids suite in 2012.

Today the company employs close to 80 people, and client testimonials highlight its ability to locate candidates in rural markets and its attention to cultural fit.