Fast-growing Online Auction Company Strengthens Organizational Culture

Over the past two decades, retail has changed completely. Today, online shopping is the default for millions of customers—and this is partly due to advances in reverse logistics that enable quick, easy, reliable returns.

However, while returns are simple for customers, they pose major challenges for retailers. In 2023, the National Retail Federation revealed that the annual value of goods returned exceeded $990 billion in North America alone. Many returned items cannot be resold as new, leaving a huge hole in retail companies’ profitability.

That’s where Nellis Auction comes in. “We liquidate online retail returns for major retailers,” explains Evan Faircloth, VP of Organizational Culture. “We buy, grade, assess, and resell around 30 million returned items on our online auction platform every year.”

From its origins as a small chain of auction houses in Las Vegas, Nellis Auction has seized the opportunity to innovate in the reverse logistics space. “We've worked through the difficulties in this industry and found efficiencies that other companies haven’t been able to unlock,” says Evan.

The result has been massive growth for Nellis Auction—including a nine-fold increase in employee numbers over the course of Evan’s time with the company. The past 24 months have been particularly explosive, with 400 new employees joining to take the total workforce up to 900 people.

“The main task right now is refining all of our systems to sustain us as we become a bigger company,” says Evan. “From an HR perspective, we were structured to be a company of no more than 200 people. We had a lot of disconnected systems and it was restricting our growth.”

The Challenge: HR Under the Hammer

Multiple systems and a lack of integration made day-to-day HR and payroll processes a headache for employees and created mountains of tedious administrative work for Nellis Auction’s HR team.

Systems That Work for No One

Coming into a new role as VP for Organizational Culture from a background in operations, Evan understood the frustrations that employees felt with the company’s existing HR processes. And as soon as he started, he realized that the systems weren’t working for the HR team either.

“As we were growing so quickly, recruiting and onboarding quickly became a huge problem,” he recalls. “Every time we hired a new person, we had to rekey all the information from the recruiting system into all our other systems—there was no integration at all. We hired more than 400 people like that, and honestly, looking back on it, I don’t know how we managed it.”

Need for a One-Stop Shop

The biggest item on Evan’s wishlist was to have a one-stop shop for HR and payroll. “As we scale up to thousands of employees, I don’t want everyone to have to log into six different systems to get the information they need to do their job,” he explains. “Our culture at Nellis is to constantly innovate and streamline everything into the most efficient process possible, and that needs to apply to our internal systems, too.

Shouting into the Void

Moreover, as the company grew, communication with the workforce was starting to become an issue. “We were relying on sending information to employees’ cell phones and personal email addresses,” says Evan. “Those are deep, dark abysses for corporate communications—we could never be sure if people were getting the message.”

The Solution: Paylocity Gets a Fair Appraisal

After an extremely detailed vendor evaluation, Nellis Auction selected Paylocity to transform the company’s organizational culture for employees and HR specialists alike.

Ambition and Innovation

Evan’s recently formed Organizational Culture team was new to the world of HR technology, but a visit from a vendor opened their eyes to the possibilities. “It was time to do some research,” he says. “We went to a big HR conference and visited almost every booth to learn about the platforms available to us.”

Nellis Auction then sent out an RFP to 30 companies, did demos with more than 20 of them, and whittled down the options until just three vendors were left. “We chose Paylocity, and it was the right choice,” says Evan. “Not just because we liked their technology, but because we felt our companies had the same ambitions, the same drive for innovation in their DNA.”

Opening up New Lines of Communication

What made Paylocity stand out for Evan? “Community is a unique thing that I didn’t see in any other platform,” he comments. “It has opened up opportunities for groups that were previously isolated to communicate with the rest of the company.” For example, now when the company’s software engineers are about to release an update to the auction platform, they post on Community to make everyone aware of the change. Moreover, because Community gives employees a convenient space to interact with each other, it has helped to drive adoption of the Paylocity Mobile App and ensure that everyone knows how to access HR services.

Streamlining Growth

Paylocity’s Recruiting module gives the Organizational Culture team a wealth of new insight into the hiring process. “We can communicate with candidates much more easily, and we can use screener questions to filter out applicants and reduce the time we spend on interviewing,” says Evan. “Transferring successful applicants’ information automatically into the Onboarding module is a huge win administratively and ensures that new employees get a good first impression of our business.”

The Results: Recommended Without Reserve

In Paylocity, Nellis Auction has found a true partner—a company with the same enthusiasm for innovation and continuous improvement.

Delivering Ahead of Schedule

Implementing any software platform across an enterprise is a challenge. That’s why Evan and his team were a little nervous about implementing a new HCM platform. “I saw it as my Super Bowl — nailing it would be the highlight of my year,” says Evan. “But although it felt like a high-pressure situation, the Paylocity team handled it flawlessly. Even though we had some curveballs with getting data out of our previous systems, Paylocity held us to good timelines, and we finished the project ahead of schedule. I was very, very impressed.”

Unlocking New Insight

Beyond the operational improvements that Paylocity delivers in areas such as HR, payroll, benefits, recruiting, onboarding, and communications, Nellis Auction is also excited about the potential of its analytics engine, Insights and Recommendations. “More than 95% of our employees are warehouse operators, and unfortunately there’s high turnover in those positions across the industry,” says Evan. “With Insights and Recommendations, we can start to analyze the specifics of how each department is doing and target any problems that are causing employees to quit.”

Building a Platform for Growth

Today, Evan is leading Organizational Culture for a 900-person company with a team of just four people—and he intends for it to stay that way. He concludes: “My goal is that as we grow the company, we don’t have to grow my department to support it. Paylocity gives me hope that we’ll be able to sustain a couple thousand employees with the same size team I have today. We know Paylocity has the capabilities to support that growth while ensuring my team can be efficient and effective in their roles and not stuck with manual work or data entry.”