A Yard Crew, Not An Org Chart.
There are 23 people at Illinois Boxes Recycle. Most of them spend their day within fifty feet of a forklift. The four house rules below get more shelf-space in the break room than any mission statement we've ever written.
Pinned to the breakroom wall.
Pinned to every onboarding.
If the box is a B, the invoice says B. We've lost orders over this. We've kept customers for ten years over it too.
If we promised pickup, we go once and finish. Splitting a job across days because dispatch was sloppy isn't a customer-service problem — it's a planning problem.
A bent flap is not a recycle bale. Reach for the refinishing table before you reach for the baler.
Nobody at this yard is reading from a phone script. If you need a discount to keep a customer, you have the authority to give one. Tell Donna afterward.
Who's where, and what they actually do.
Routes every inbound, every pickup, and every outbound shipment. Run by Donna, the same dispatcher we hired in 2017.
First touch on every inbound load. They put the A/B/C grade on the box before it goes anywhere else in the yard.
Where bent flaps get straightened, torn liners get replaced, and busted bottoms get reinforced. The line everyone wants to tour.
Whatever can't be reused gets compacted and shipped to one of three certified domestic mills. Boring, important work.
Forklifts, trailers, and the eight bay doors. They keep the yard from becoming a maze of stacked walls.
Quotes, invoices, vendor relationships, and the unenviable job of explaining freight markets to first-time sellers.
A few of the people you might meet at the yard.
Came from a regional freight company where she ran the night dispatch board. Donna writes the morning route plan in pencil on a printed sheet, even though we have software for it. The software follows the binder.
Eight years running an upholstery repair shop before joining us. The jigs and benches on our refinishing line are mostly his designs. He still keeps a sketchpad in his shop apron.
Created the four-check grading protocol pinned above every grading bench. The Tuesday-morning practice ritual was her idea.
Started the company by accident. Writes most of the blog posts. Spends a third of his week on the dock. Insists he is not a 'CEO.'
Twelve years of regional freight before joining us. The Joliet Loop is his baby; customers remember him by name, he remembers their kids' names.
Personally palletized and shrink-wrapped about a million boxes since starting. Knows every customer's preferred wrap pattern by memory.
Owns invoices, AR, and the per-customer BOL translation tables. Caught the August 2024 paperwork discrepancy that turned into a forty-day project.
Names every forklift. Runs the Tuesday-morning practice sessions. Has never dropped a load and is slightly superstitious about that fact.
What Tuesday at the yard looks like.
06:30 — Lights on
Reggie and the forklift crew arrive. Coffee starts. The Tuesday practice session begins at 7:30, so the next hour is mostly equipment checks and the first wave of inbound trailer prep.
06:45 — Donna's route review
Donna prints the day's route plan. She marks adjustments in pencil based on the prior afternoon's customer emails. Drivers get a verbal walkthrough at 6:55. Coffee is shared.
07:30 — Practice session
Fifteen minutes of focused forklift skill practice. This week's focus: tight-radius turns in narrow aisles. Marcus from outbound watches; he sometimes joins.
07:50 — First trailer arrives
The Joliet inbound — 320 boxes from the polymer compounder — backs into bay four. Patricia is at bench three. Coffee, the second cup, has been delivered.
10:30 — Outbound staging
Marcus pulls the day's outbound — three pallets to an Iowa customer, half a truckload to a Wisconsin 3PL. Shrink-wrapping starts. Tasha prints the BOLs.
12:15 — Lunch break
Mostly in the breakroom. The breakroom has a chess set that's almost never used and a coffee maker that's never not in use. The walls have the four house rules pinned at eye level.
14:00 — Quotes & office work
Tasha and Eli answer inbound quote requests that arrived during the morning. Most get a written quote inside the hour.
16:30 — Outbound dispatch
Afternoon trailers leave. Donna marks them off her binder. The dispatch board gets reset for tomorrow.
17:00 — Lights off
Reggie does the last forklift checks. The bay doors close. The yard is quiet for the next 13 hours.
We hire pattern-matchers, not pedigrees.
The blog post about how we hired Mateo (an upholstery repair specialist with no corrugated background) is on the field journal. The principle behind it has shaped every hire since: we look for people whose previous work taught them to see structural failure and structural repair patterns. The material doesn't have to be cardboard.
That has led us to hire:
- A former HVAC technician who's now our second-best grader (HVAC people see thermal-cycle stress patterns)
- A retired wood-flooring installer who runs our pallet inspection (wood-grain reading transfers)
- A former baker who joined the outbound dock (baking taught her to read load distribution and balance — surprisingly applicable to forklift work)
We've also hired people directly out of warehouse and packaging backgrounds. Both work. The combination is what makes the yard interesting to work at.
Always taking applications.
We hire for grading, forklift, dispatch, refinishing, and the office — usually two or three open posts at any given time. Send a note through the form on this page (any page, really) and a yard manager will get back to you.