My First HR Tech Door Opened in a Factory

How FactoryFix, a manufacturing comedy series and one stolen stuffed sloth led me into HR technology.

Late one night in New Orleans, after the booths had been set up and almost everyone had left the convention hall, I stole a stuffed animal.

It was sitting inside the booth of a company called ERIN. No one was around. The sloth was cute. I took it.

At the time, I was setting up for FactoryFix, the manufacturing hiring platform that had brought me into HR and talent acquisition technology. I had not yet worked with ERIN. Mike Stafiej, ERIN’s founder and CEO, had no idea that one of his stuffed animals was about to leave the building with a future member of his marketing team.

I did eventually confess to Mike, although not until much later—probably after ERIN had become my customer.

The funny thing is that the sloth was not the most important thing I carried away from that conference.

Standing in a room filled with hundreds of HR technology vendors, I realized I had barely heard of any of them. There were products for recruiting, referrals, candidate engagement, assessments, benefits, compliance and almost every other part of work. Many of these companies were building useful technology. Few had become names that people outside their immediate circles recognized.

I saw blue sky. Green grass. A giant market full of companies that might need exactly the kind of creative PR and marketing work I knew how to do.

That realization started with FactoryFix.

The phone call that opened the door

Alex Guggenberger called me one day after he had been working at FactoryFix for a few months in a product and project role.

He told me Patrick O’Rahilly had created a very cool company. FactoryFix was helping manufacturers find and hire skilled workers, but it was a strongly sales-led organization with little or no real marketing operation.

The team was beginning to look for help. They were considering people from the manufacturing world and people from the HR industry.

I was not the conventional candidate from either category.

I came from consumer technology, entertainment, internet culture, live video, events and publicity projects designed to give people something interesting to talk about. I had put poker-playing robots at the World Series of Poker, helped turn six Shiba Inu puppies into a global livestreaming phenomenon and worn branded T-shirts on the internet for a living.

That different background became an advantage.

I reached out to Patrick, pitched the work and won the business. FactoryFix initially became an Evan White PR client, with me serving as a fractional marketing leader. That relationship eventually became a full-time position. Altogether, we worked together for roughly a year and a half, and I remain on the company’s cap table through shares I earned during that period.

The assignment was broad and refreshingly direct: create fun content, get FactoryFix into the right conferences and connect the company with influential people across manufacturing.

In other words, make manufacturing hiring interesting.

Taking a sales-led company into the market

FactoryFix already knew how to sell. What it needed was a visible story around the product and the people building it.

We took the company to SHRM, UNLEASH, several state SHRM conferences and manufacturing-industry events. We helped put Patrick on stages and introduced him to podcast audiences where he could talk about the manufacturing labor shortage, the skills gap and the way FactoryFix matched employers with skilled workers.

Those conversations included appearances on shows such as Industrial Talk and Manufacturing Happy Hour.

The point was not simply to collect podcast links or event badges. Every appearance gave Patrick another opportunity to explain the problem in his own voice. Every conference created new conversations with manufacturers, candidates and partners. Every introduction helped FactoryFix become more familiar inside the industry it served.

That is still how I think about good PR. One appearance rarely changes a company’s future. Recognition grows when the market encounters the same company, story and people in several credible places.

Then we made a workplace comedy

The most ambitious expression of that approach was Factory Made.

Instead of producing another corporate video about the manufacturing skills gap, we created a six-episode comedy web series. It followed a rich kid attempting to resurrect the factory that produced his favorite childhood drink. The series used actors and comedians to find humor in factory-floor problems while pointing toward a very real issue: American manufacturers needed people.

The Alliance for American Manufacturing described Factory Made as an Office-style look inside American manufacturing. Alex shared the original trailer before the episodes began rolling out in the summer of 2021.

It was branded entertainment before most B2B companies would have considered making branded entertainment. It gave FactoryFix a creative property of its own, created material for social media and press, and made a labor-market challenge easier to approach.

The comedy was the delivery system. The workforce problem underneath it was serious.

That combination mattered. Business audiences do not stop being human when they arrive at work. They still notice originality. They still laugh. They still remember the company willing to do something different.

From high schools to Lambeau Field

The work also took us well beyond conventional trade-show floors.

I helped begin conversations between FactoryFix and the National Association of Manufacturers. That relationship eventually grew into a public partnership among FactoryFix, the NAM and the Manufacturing Institute around Creators Connect, a career-resources platform designed to help students, parents, job seekers and other career influencers explore opportunities in modern manufacturing.

We joined manufacturing events and workforce programs around the country. We visited high school students and talked about the real career opportunities available in manufacturing. We went to Green Bay and saw Lambeau Field through the lens of jobs, skills and the future workforce.

Then there was Midland, Michigan.

The Creators Wanted Tour arrived there for the Dow Great Lakes Bay Invitational, its first activation at a major golf tournament. The official program included career coaching from FactoryFix alongside an immersive experience intended to help students and families see modern manufacturing differently.

I remember the trip for another reason too: the journey into Midland felt like traveling to a different scale of America.

We flew over one of the Great Lakes and landed at a tiny airport with a single terminal. The people who checked our bags appeared to become the TSA agents and then the people scanning tickets at the gate. Everyone seemed to have three jobs, and somehow the whole operation worked.

That small airport became one of my clearest memories from the FactoryFix years. We were traveling into communities where manufacturing was not an abstract economic category. It was part of the landscape, the schools, the families and the available future.

The marketing worked best when we respected that reality while still bringing some imagination to how we told the story.

What changed for FactoryFix

During our time together, FactoryFix became more recognizable.

More candidates joined the platform and submitted their resumes. Patrick appeared on stages and podcasts. The company developed stronger visibility at conferences and created media that could continue working after an event ended. Industry partnerships put FactoryFix into conversations with manufacturers, schools, students and workforce leaders.

Not every useful result fits neatly inside one attribution report. Some of the value was visible in registrations and leads. Some appeared in introductions, invitations and partnerships. Some came from people finally recognizing the name when FactoryFix entered the room.

The larger result for me was equally important: I had discovered an industry where my approach fit.

The sloth and the next chapter

That brings us back to the unattended ERIN booth in New Orleans.

I was there because of FactoryFix. FactoryFix had taught me the language of recruiting technology, workforce challenges, candidate communities and HR conferences. It had shown me how much creative opportunity existed inside industries that were accustomed to careful, conventional B2B marketing.

Then I looked around that massive conference hall and saw hundreds of companies trying to become known.

The products were different, but the communications problem was familiar. These companies needed sharper stories. They needed customer proof. They needed relationships with analysts, podcasters, practitioners and event organizers. They needed ideas people could see, photograph, experience and remember.

Eventually, ERIN became a customer. I became its fractional CMO. We built research, conference activations, analyst relationships, podcast visibility and a red-shoe community that made an employee-referral platform difficult to miss.

That work helped lead to Talent Tech PR and Purple Acorn, and to the HR and talent acquisition focus that now defines much of my work.

I cannot claim that stealing a stuffed sloth created my HR tech career. Alex’s phone call and the opportunity at FactoryFix deserve most of the credit.

But the sloth makes a much better souvenir.

B2B marketing does not have to be boring

FactoryFix reinforced something I had already learned in consumer technology and entertainment: serious work does not require forgettable marketing.

You can discuss the manufacturing skills gap and still make a comedy series. You can build recruiting technology and still create an event people genuinely enjoy. You can speak to executives without draining every trace of personality from the story.

The goal is not to manufacture attention for its own sake. The goal is to make the real value of the company easier to notice, understand and remember.

My first HR tech door opened in a factory. Once I walked through it, I saw an entire industry waiting for better stories.

If you are building an HR tech, talent acquisition or workforce technology company and need help becoming recognizable, read more about how I approach talent technology PR and what an integrated HR tech PR campaign can include. Then book a conversation with Evan White PR.