A small company behind very big machines
ICC International is a family-owned manufacturer in East Tennessee with a specialty almost nobody outside heavy industry thinks about: industrial commutators and slip rings.
Their products sit inside large electric motors used across steel and aluminum mills, mining, pulp and paper, power generation, propulsion, and other critical industrial applications. Some of the commutators they build are more than 10 feet across.
It is specialized work, and ICC has built its reputation by being able to take on difficult jobs where quality and experience matter.
That creates an equally specialized workforce problem. ICC needs machinists, production talent, technicians, and other skilled people who can work with copper, mica, steel, large assemblies, tight tolerances, and custom parts that may look completely different from the job that came through the shop last week.
We had to learn how a commutator gets made
One of our favorite parts of working with ICC has been getting to know the product itself.
Building a large commutator can involve copper and mica segment packs, machining, pressing, heating, brazing, assembly, finishing, inspection, and a lot of hands-on judgment along the way.
Once our team understood that process, we could get much more specific about the people ICC needed.
Instead of asking whether someone had “machining experience,” Laborup could understand what they had actually built, the materials they knew, the equipment they had worked around, how much of a job they could own themselves, and whether they would be comfortable in a custom manufacturing environment.
Our agents use that context to identify and engage people across the market, dig deeper into their actual experience, and bring ICC a much tighter group of people who fit the work.
The relationship made the product better
We have also been lucky to build a real relationship with Tracy and the ICC team.
We have spent time learning the business from them, understanding what they care about, and getting a feel for the people who fit ICC beyond what can ever be written in a job description.
That feedback gets built back into Laborup. Every conversation, interview, hire, and outcome gives our team and our agents a better understanding of who belongs at ICC.
That is a big reason the partnership works. We are not relearning the company every time another need comes up. We already know the shop, the work, and the people behind it.
Moving faster without lowering the bar
Laborup has helped ICC hire roughly 6× faster while reducing cost per hire by more than 50%.
But the bigger advantage is that the knowledge stays in the system.
Laborup now understands ICC’s operation, the work, the materials, the roles, and the people who tend to succeed there. Our agents use that context every time a new need comes up, and every hire makes the model better.
So ICC does not start from zero every time the business needs to add capacity.
They already have a workforce system built around how their shop actually works.
