Hometown Hiring Aims to Connect Dubois County Employers, Employees

By Kris Norton

Jasper – Hometown Hiring: Dubois County is using local ties to bring employers and potential employees together.

Three years ago, three Jasper High School graduates – Luke Hochgesang, Donald Bough, and Noah Bawel – set out to empower their home town, and county, through employment connections.

“Our overall focus with everything we’ve been trying to do is thinking ‘How do we empower our hometown, Jasper, and Dubois County by better connecting people who are from here, from around the area, with one another, with their high school, and their alumni, and then with job opportunities in the area?’” said Co-Founder Luke Hochgesang.

After college, Hochgesang, Bough, and Bawel have since moved from Dubois County, though their mission has remained the same. The three co-founders recently announced the addition of Morgan Thewes, Head of Partnerships, who had been following the group’s progress.

“I noticed that Hometown Hiring has been more feasible for this community within the past few years, especially, with everybody struggling to fulfill their jobs right now,” Thewes said. “Since I have such a footprint on the community – I’m on the Chamber, I’m on Heart of Jasper, I’m a resident - so I was thinking, “Okay, Luke doesn’t live here, and neither do several of his people’. So I thought that maybe I could serve as their superconnector to help them try and make it a little more user-friendly and figure out how we can fill any gaps that they might have on their platform.

While job searches through national sites can be tedious and time-consuming, HometownHiring.com preaches simplicity with a local flair.

“We wanted to make this something that would be fully autonomous and be able to run without our control,” Hochgesang said. “There isn’t necessarily a pairing process at the moment. How it works is that employers can go onto Hometown Hiring and they can set up a profile and post a job in less than five minutes.”

“We try to make it a super easy process for them to be able to do, themselves,” Hochgesang added.

Hometown Hiring lets job-seekers work with the whole list of jobs county-wide, rather than attempting to pair potential employees with employers which may or may not be what the seeker is searching for.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has created multiple difficulties for workers and businesses alike, Hometown Hiring is looking to bridge the gap – as well as bringing younger individuals into the fold.

“We were taking about how we can get the youth more involved about wanting to support the community,” Thewes said. “We don’t want to see these small businesses struggle during this time – Brew and some other places have had to go to more limited hours because they just do not have the help to support their full time that they wanted to. I think if we can start them younger, getting them more involved, and showing them that we want them to have that support in our community, it’s just going to be more fulfilling long-term. Then they have these” jobs long-term with us as they grow older and keep it within the community.

The organization has already played matchmaker in the community, Hochgesang says.

“We recently helped Hoosier Business Machines find an Administrative Assistant employee,” Hochgesang said. “They only came to Hometown Hiring, and they didn’t go to any other source to try to find an employee. That was something where they put a lot of trust in us, and I wanted to make sure that we were able to deliver for them.”

The success of the job search did not go unnoticed by Hoosier Business Machines.

“On top of that, the feedback we got, from Kim Lottes, the President of Hoosier Business Machines, she said that working with Hometown Hiring brought us the most successful job opening advertising that we’ve had,” Hochgesang said. “For us, as someone who’s leading the organization, that is so exciting.”

Jobs throughout Dubois County can be found online and HometownHiring.com.