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Challenge: A Lean Team, Manual Work, and an 11% Renege Rate
Southwire’s early career program was scaling fast, but the two-person team supporting it was stretched thin. Newsletters were written and sent by hand. Cohort coordination lived in 16 separate group texts Caryn built from personal phone numbers. Training tracking across co-op rotations lived in spreadsheets. Recruiting season made the problem worse, with the team traveling every week from September through October with no bandwidth left for candidate engagement.
The result was an 11% renege rate that was costing the business in lost talent and lost ramp time.
“Hectic, stressful…. During recruiting season, engaging with students was impossible… I don’t have the bandwidth to monitor engagement manually. I send it out and pray for the best.”
The business case was straightforward: Symba would let the team scale the program without hiring another recruiter, and it sat inside the Yello ecosystem the team already trusted, with no new vendor process and no new security review.
Solution: Symba Automated the Manual Work and Created a Connected Experience for Everyone
Southwire rolled out Symba with a small spring cohort first, using a hands-on approach before scaling to the full summer class. By the time 96 students started in summer 2026, the team had already optimized journeys, surveys, and discussion boards, and pulled managers and mentors into the platform directly.
Today, Southwire uses Symba to:
- Automate journeys and newsletters built in advance, so engagement no longer competes with recruiting travel.
- Run discussion posts that connect students, managers, and mentors without recruiter brokering.
- Push NACE competencies directly into student journeys without routing through other internal teams.
- Track rotation training and project assignments across cohorts, eliminating duplicated content.
- Maintain a single source of truth for documents, onboarding, and the manual reimbursement process.
“I can create newsletters in batches and set them to automate. The discussion posts have made a huge difference in candidate engagement from offer to start.”
Results: Scale, Engagement and ROI
Symba helped Southwire scale its program without scaling its team, deepen engagement across students, managers, and mentors, and turn that connected experience into measurable ROI. Students felt excitement about joining Southwire well before day one, managers had an organic way to engage, and that energy turned offers into starts.
The impact is clear:
- Renege rate cut from 11% to 5%, a 55% reduction.
- Program grew 42% to 96 students, with no additional recruiter hired.
- ~80% reduction in repeat questions from managers and HR partners, now that resources live in one searchable hub.
- ~50% time savings (conservative) on the student reimbursement process alone.
- Zero “per-my-last-email” moments in 2026, compared to weekly occurrences in 2025.
“Last year we had an 11% renege rate with 67 students. This year we have 96 students and a 5% renege rate. It’s not just that the rate went down. Our program grew so much that I’d have expected the rate to be higher. The fact that it’s down by more than half is huge.”
“We're really ahead of schedule. Are we forgetting things? Are we missing things? No, we've done it all. I don't even think we're stressed. I'm just excited."
Engagement quality has shifted, too. Students are proactive about deadlines in Symba. Managers are requesting expanded access so more of their team members can engage with students.
"Our managers are looking at how they can use Symba to be better managers, oversee projects, and get more members of their teams involved."
The clearest signal came from the students themselves. One returning co-op, heading into his third rotation, used Symba to find the incoming hire joining his manager’s team, introduced them directly, and walked them through the platform himself. Peer-to-peer onboarding the team didn’t have to orchestrate, and exactly the kind of ownership that turns offers into starts.
"I enjoy using Symba because it makes pre-boarding and orientation something easy to understand and it's very intuitive to see events and tasks that need to be completed."
“Instead of filling a req, I want every candidate to feel valued, that Southwire wants them to grow. We automate the process, not the people. Symba has allowed me to do that in so many ways.”
What’s Next
Southwire is now using Symba to quantify the business impact of student projects, turning project outputs into a data-backed story for leadership to keep scaling investment in early careers. Managers are pulling more team members into the platform, deepening the bench of employees engaging with students.
“If you want to save time, save effort, make your program more engaging, more impactful, more beneficial for literally everyone involved, get Symba. Especially for teams like ours: large programs, small teams. I don’t know that we could have pulled off this year without it.”
Want to see how Symba can help your early career team scale without adding headcount?
