HR Companies & HR Consultants in Elkhart, IN

HR Collaboration Group, usually shortened to HRC, is a human resources and business consulting firm headquartered in Elkhart, Indiana, a short drive east of South Bend. It mainly supports small and mid-sized employers that either have no dedicated HR department or need more capacity than their current staff can provide.

The firm presents itself as a partner embedded with each client's own people rather than an arm's-length vendor. It helps in person at the workplace or remotely by phone and video, depending on what a given situation requires.

Engagement Options

Buyers can choose from three engagement styles: hourly consulting for occasional questions, ongoing recurring HR support, or bundled packages that pair advisory hours with defined compliance or project work. According to the firm, many routine questions are settled within a brief call, so clients pay only for the expertise they actually use.

HRC also places interim and fractional HR professionals with organizations. These assignments can cover an employee on maternity or medical leave, run a specific HR initiative, absorb seasonal spikes in workload, or bring specialist knowledge to a complex problem, all without a permanent hire.

• HR discovery audits and priority setting
• Strategic planning, cascading goals and KPIs
• Performance management systems and development plans
• Total compensation, variable pay and benefits strategy
• Policy and employee handbook creation
• Investigations, transitions and offboarding
• Stay interviews, engagement surveys and payroll services

HRC also recruits for clients nationally, filling roles from administrative staff up to executives. It can work on an hourly, fixed-fee or contingency basis. The process covers writing and posting job ads, sourcing candidates through more than fifty channels, behavioral screening assessments to judge fit, and help with interviews and onboarding. The firm cites manufacturing, healthcare, engineering and general business as its areas of particular recruiting expertise, and it reports a 96 percent retention rate for its placements.

Compliance, Safety and Leadership

On the compliance side, HRC tailors its discovery audits to each client's industry and offers employment law and OSHA audits, COBRA tracking reviews, ACA support including 1095 filings, Form 5500 and PCORI reviews, EEO-1 checks and harassment training.

For workplace safety, it works with certified safety professionals to build and review safety programs, lean manufacturing processes, annual and new-hire training materials, and to help with safety investigations and workers' compensation matters. Its leadership development work ranges from individual coaching for managers to supervisory courses for larger groups.

The firm's consultants hold college degrees and professional HR certifications. Beyond people management, HRC offers general business advice, including merger and acquisition guidance, accounting and finance consulting, and social media marketing training.

Clients quoted on its site, among them Pranger Enterprises, Insight Accounting Group and TouchTronics, describe help with handbook updates, workers' compensation cases, pandemic-era guidance, process improvements and a search for lower-cost health insurance. That mix of HR, recruiting, compliance, safety and business support under one roof is the firm's main point of difference for employers comparing local providers.

Lynk Solutions is an Elkhart, Indiana firm that combines employee benefits brokerage with human resources support. Its main clients are small and mid-sized employers, and it focuses on organizations with fewer than 100 workers. The firm also helps individuals, self-employed professionals and people approaching Medicare. Buyers comparing HR providers will find that it handles both health coverage and day-to-day people management for companies that are too small to have their own HR department.

HR outsourcing and fractional HR

Lynk Solutions offers outsourced and fractional HR for owners who need professional help without hiring full-time HR staff. Its HR work covers several core areas:

• Recruiting and staffing support for finding, hiring and keeping employees
• Writing written policies and procedures so rules are applied consistently
• Payroll processing, including accurate pay and tax compliance
• Leave management, including tracking of PTO, sick time and legally required leave
• HR compliance services, including record-keeping and keeping up with labor law changes

The firm suggests this model for owners who are struggling with payroll and compliance, need hiring help or have no formal workplace policies. It presents its approach as built around the size and real-world needs of small employers rather than standard corporate templates.

Benefits and insurance

Benefits planning is the other half of the business. For employers, Lynk Solutions designs group medical plans and sets up Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements (ICHRA), which let employers offer flexible health benefits while keeping spending under control. It also arranges dental, vision, disability, life, telemedicine and other supplemental coverage.

For individuals, it helps people choose individual medical plans, Medicare Advantage and Medicare Supplement policies, life insurance and long-term care coverage. The firm also runs a dedicated benefits program for tattoo artists, which is unusual among local brokers.

How engagements work

Clients start by contacting the firm or enrolling online. Lynk Solutions then reviews their needs and prepares a strategy before putting it in place. The first consultation is free. Employers can ask for a review of their current coverage at any time, not just before renewal. The firm says its goals are to lower healthcare costs, improve benefits and simplify HR administration for employers who want to look after their staff on a limited budget.

Team and background

The firm was founded by Lynn Miller, a benefits advisor who works mainly with small employers on benefits, health insurance and HR. The company's HR materials name her as the lead on hiring, payroll, workplace culture and compliance. Julia Fisher is a licensed insurance advisor who has also run her own business for more than 16 years.

Her specialties are Medicare, Affordable Care Act planning and life insurance. Client reviews on the site mention both advisors by name. The office is on East Bristol Street in Elkhart and is open on weekdays. Lynk Solutions' stated mission is to make benefits and HR easier to understand and more personal for business owners who feel overlooked by larger providers.

Specialized Staffing Solutions is a women- and minority-owned workforce firm that combines temporary and direct-hire recruiting with human resources consulting. Its Elkhart branch is one of several offices across northern Indiana and southwest Michigan, and it gives employers in Elkhart, Bristol, Middlebury and nearby Cass County, Michigan, a local point of contact. For buyers comparing HR providers, the company stands out because it pairs recruiting capacity with a dedicated HR advisory division under one roof.

Five Divisions

The company organizes its work into five business lines, so a client can bring hourly hiring, office roles, technical positions and HR strategy to one vendor instead of juggling several:

• Light industrial staffing for production, assembly and general labor roles
• Administrative and office staffing
• Skilled and technical placements
• Professional search for salaried and leadership positions
• HR solutions, delivered as consulting engagements

Its recruiters fill openings in manufacturing, human resources, office administration, education, industrial management and engineering. The firm says it can scale an order from a couple of workers to a couple of hundred, which suits Elkhart-area manufacturers whose headcount needs change with production cycles. Besides branch-based recruiting, it runs onsite programs at client facilities, and its website names onsite operations at employers in the Elkhart area.

HR Consulting

The HR Solutions division builds plans around each client rather than selling a fixed package. Its consultants hold SHRM credentials, including the SPHR designation, and Six Sigma training at the Black Belt level, which suggests a process-improvement approach to people operations. This makes the firm an option for small and mid-sized employers that lack a full internal HR department, or for companies that want outside expertise alongside their staffing vendor.

Background and Credentials

Founded in 2001, the company has spent more than two decades in the Michiana region and keeps its corporate office in South Bend. Branches listed on its site include Elkhart, Goshen, South Bend, Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids.

It holds certification from the National Minority Supplier Development Council and the Women's Business Enterprise National Council, is recognized by the State of Indiana as a minority- and women-owned business, and displays an EcoVadis rating. Those credentials can help larger buyers meet supplier diversity and sustainability goals. Its NAICS codes cover temporary help services and executive search.

Clients and workers use separate online portals to manage assignments and account details. The company also publishes a monthly labor market review that employers can subscribe to for regional hiring trends.

Job seekers who visit the Elkhart office are pointed to local community resources such as shelters, meal programs and emergency assistance, which shows the branch's ties to the area it serves. For Elkhart organizations weighing an HR partner, the firm's main strengths are its range of recruiting divisions, certified HR consultants, and diversity credentials that matter in corporate procurement.

Spherion Staffing & Recruiting in Elkhart is the local branch of a national staffing and recruiting brand that runs through a network of independent franchise owners. The Elkhart team says the branch has been locally owned and operated since it opened. It works on both sides of the hiring market: it places job seekers in temporary, temp-to-hire and permanent roles, and it helps area employers deal with short-term gaps, hiring for growth and longer-term workforce planning.

Services for employers

Employers can pick the type of engagement that fits each opening. Spherion's main workforce offerings include:

• Flexible staffing for interim coverage, built for last-minute requests and assignments that run from a few days to several months
• Temp-to-hire arrangements, so a company can watch a worker perform on the job before offering a permanent role, or hold off on a permanent hire when budgets or market conditions are uncertain
• Direct-hire placement for permanent roles, including outreach to passive candidates and checks on their qualifications
• Skilled trades staffing for roles such as welders, machinists, CNC operators, maintenance technicians and electrical workers
• Partner on-premise staffing, which puts dedicated Spherion staff at the client's site to handle daily staffing needs as an extension of the HR function
• Managed staffing, where Spherion takes on the administrative and technology side of the hiring process

The Elkhart office also lists on-premise management and outsourced talent acquisition among its local services. Employers can request a free skills-based salary guide, which gives pay comparisons for specific roles in the local area based on years of experience and company size.

Industries and approach

Spherion recruits for administrative and clerical work, customer and contact centers, light industrial and manufacturing jobs, non-clinical healthcare, accounting and finance, information technology and hospitality. Its approach rests on local relationships. Recruiters live in the communities they serve and try to understand each client's culture, so they can place workers who fit well and stay longer. For job seekers, a single application can lead to several matched openings, some of which are only available through the agency.

Background and credentials

The company traces its history back about 80 years to one office in Chicago, and it has operated under several names since then. Today it reports around 200 franchised locations in 35 states. It says it puts more than 440,000 people to work each year and serves more than 3,200 clients.

Spherion reports a 4.9 Google rating based on more than 50,000 reviews and describes itself as the most-awarded franchise brand in staffing and recruiting. The franchise model combines the resources of a national organization with decisions made by local owners.

In Elkhart, a team of recruiters and staff that includes several members of the Pentenburg family serves area businesses and candidates, and the branch describes itself as family owned. The office also says it regularly gives time and money to local nonprofits, as part of the brand's wider community giveback program.

This branch suits Elkhart-area employers who want one partner for temporary help, trial-to-hire roles, permanent recruiting and on-site workforce management. Its focus is staffing and recruiting rather than broader HR consulting such as payroll or benefits administration.