From Manual Recruiting to 21 Hires in 45 Days: How Backyard Breaks Built Its Recruiting Function With Loxo

“I estimated it would take a month to make 12 hires. We did it in 13 days. If I didn't have Loxo, that would not have happened, guaranteed.”

In just a few years, Backyard Breaks has grown from two brothers working out of a garage to a 100+-person, multimillion-dollar sports entertainment company.

As the world's leading live-streaming seller in the trading card space, Backyard Breaks operates eight channels around the clock. Behind them is a growing team that includes fulfillment and warehouse employees, videographers, front-office staff, and specialized on-air talent.

But the company's recruiting infrastructure hadn't kept pace with its growth.

When Marti Glass joined Backyard Breaks to build out its internal recruiting function, hiring was being managed on a Google spreadsheet.

"They had no tracking system. They had no automation. They had no single source of truth," Marti said. "There needed to be a system."

Fortunately, she already knew which one she wanted.

Building a recruiting function ready to scale

Backyard Breaks had already grown to more than 100 employees, and its hiring needs were continuing to increase. The new recruiting function needed more than a replacement for its Google spreadsheet. It needed a system that could support the business as it grew.

Marti had previously used Loxo in agency recruiting, where she'd helped build out the platform for another organization. That experience gave her a clear idea of the infrastructure Backyard Breaks would need.

She made Loxo part of her plan before she even had the job.

"If you guys aren't using a solution, I have one," she told the team during her interview. "I will come to the table with one."

When Backyard Breaks asked Marti to outline her first 90 days during her second interview, establishing Loxo as the foundation for recruiting was one of her first priorities.

"We have to establish a system and a platform that we can start from," she said. "That was the very first thing."

Instead of continuing to rely on spreadsheets as hiring increased, Backyard Breaks could build its recruiting function from the beginning on infrastructure designed to support its growth.

Reducing time-to-hire from day one with Loxo

That infrastructure quickly translated into results.

One of the first major tests came when Backyard Breaks needed to add 12 people across its day and night shifts.

 Marti initially estimated that filling those positions would take a month.

It took 13 days.

"I knew the solution that I had. I had a game plan. I knew my plan of attack and how I was going to go about it," Marti said. "If I didn't have Loxo, that would not have happened, guaranteed."

And it wasn't an isolated hiring push. In Marti's first 45 days, Backyard Breaks made 21 hires.

But hiring quickly wasn't the only challenge the new recruiting function needed to solve. Backyard Breaks' strong reputation means plenty of people want to work there, creating another challenge for a lean recruiting team.

Turning high applicant volume into a manageable pipeline

For Backyard Breaks, the biggest challenge isn’t finding interested candidates; it’s efficiently managing the volume of people who want to work there.

For one part-time fulfillment role alone, 225 applicants entered the hiring process in roughly two weeks.

With Loxo, those applicants enter a structured pipeline where the recruiting team can track recruiter screens, hiring manager interviews, notes, rejections, and other stages without relying on a spreadsheet to keep everything straight.

"It's great to have the applicants coming in, but how can I get them to effectively move through my pipeline without having to touch every single one every single time?" Marti said. With Loxo, "now they're coming in and they're all stationed in our little buckets in our Kanban view."

Loxo’s workflow is flexible enough to reflect the requirements of different types of roles.

For example, Backyard Breaks' on-air talent must complete a video audition. Marti added "Video Audition Sent" and "Video Audition Received" stages and uses automation and templates to support follow-up and keep candidates moving through the process.

That structure makes it easier to see where candidates are in the hiring process and where delays are occurring.

"I can't just have people sitting in my buckets," Marti said. "I need to move them through the pipeline, and I also need to identify where the delays are."

Turning today's applicants into tomorrow's talent pool

Managing applicant volume solves an immediate problem. Capturing that activity in Loxo also gives Backyard Breaks something it didn't have before: a searchable, reusable talent database.

Loxo lets Backyard Breaks categorize candidates by relevant attributes, like fulfillment, sports specialties, or Pokémon, allowing the recruiting team to return to great candidates it has already identified when another hiring need emerges.

"If I categorize them, I can always go back and find them," Marti said. "Six months from now when I go back to search for additional fulfillment folks, all I have to do is click the dropdown, select fulfillment, and there are the 400 people I've spoken to."

That means each hiring cycle can contribute to the next one.

A candidate who isn't right for today's opening doesn't have to disappear into an old spreadsheet or inbox. Their information, history, and context remain part of Backyard Breaks' recruiting database, giving the company a pool of known talent to revisit as it grows.

"If you're not assigned to a specific place, you will fall through the cracks," Marti said. "That's the other thing that I love about Loxo. The second that I add someone, I can immediately assign them to a job. They're not going to get lost in my database."

Getting more from the recruiting budget

The value of that recruiting infrastructure extends beyond efficiency. Loxo is also helping Backyard Breaks get more from the money it was already spending to hire.

Before Loxo, the company relied exclusively on Indeed, paying by the day to advertise individual openings. Marti estimates that advertising a single role for just six days at $50 per day covers the cost of a month of Loxo.

With Loxo, that investment supports much more than job advertising. Backyard Breaks can manage its entire recruiting process, automate candidate follow-up, coordinate hiring managers, build a reusable talent database, and reach candidates through additional sources.

"The investment that you make even with two seats would pay for what you spend on Indeed in a month twice, three times," Marti said.

For a lean internal recruiting team, that means the recruiting budget isn't only helping fill today's openings. It's also building the infrastructure and talent intelligence Backyard Breaks can continue using as it grows.

Giving hiring managers a more connected recruiting process

An internal recruiting function has multiple clients of its own: the hiring managers across the business.

"All of my hiring managers are now my clients," Marti said. "It's just a switch of mentality."

At Backyard Breaks, that means supporting teams with very different talent needs. The fulfillment department, production team, on-air talent organization, and front office each have their own requirements, communication preferences, and expectations.

Loxo gives Marti and her HR team active seats while allowing them to bring stakeholders across the business into the recruiting process. They can associate internal stakeholders with jobs, submit candidates, share resumes, send invitations, and coordinate interviews from the same system.

For a lean internal recruiting operation, that creates a structured way to work with multiple departments without creating a separate process for each one.

Extending the recruiting workflow beyond the hire

Building an internal recruiting function also means thinking beyond placement.

For an agency recruiter, the process ends when a candidate is hired. Backyard Breaks needs to maintain the relationship after that point.

"Before, I wasn’t involved in what happened after a hire," Marti said. "And now I am."

So Backyard Breaks' Loxo workflow doesn't stop at "hired."

Its pipeline includes roughly 20 stages, extending from application through hiring and into onboarding, retention, six-month milestones, rejection, and "no longer employed."

Notes and triggers help move people through those stages, giving the HR team a record it can continue to use after recruiting is complete.

The result is a workflow designed around Backyard Breaks' employee lifecycle, with a place for people from the moment they apply through their entire time with the company.

Building recruiting infrastructure for the growth ahead

Backyard Breaks isn't finished growing.

The company is preparing to move into a significantly larger studio in February 2027. To prepare, it's already increasing headcount in areas such as fulfillment and warehouse operations so the people and processes are in place before the move.

That makes the recruiting infrastructure Backyard Breaks is building today important well beyond its immediate hiring needs.

The applicants entering Loxo today become part of its future talent pool. The workflows established now can be reused as hiring volume increases. And the recruiting process doesn't have to be rebuilt every time the company enters another stage of growth.

For Marti, that's one of the most important lessons for other companies building an internal recruiting function: invest the time upfront to design the process you're going to need later.

"You do it once the right way the first time, and you never have to worry about it again," she said.

Her advice to other internal recruiting teams is to approach implementation as an investment in the recruiting function itself: learn the system, understand how it supports the team's process, and configure it around where the organization is going.

"If you're making the investment in your company, and you're making the investment in the division of recruiting for that company long-term, then you should understand how something can benefit you long-term."

For Backyard Breaks, that investment is already paying off.

In just a few weeks, the company has gone from spreadsheets and disconnected hiring activity to a structured recruiting operation capable of handling hundreds of applicants, keeping candidates moving, building a reusable talent database, and supporting employees beyond their hire date.

And as Backyard Breaks prepares for its next stage of growth, the recruiting infrastructure to support it is already in place.

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