As the global manufacturing industry evolves it faces new challenges, particularly in sourcing talent. While company leaders navigate trade regulations and push toward shorter production runs, the talent they need is in short supply. Seasoned workers are aging out of the workforce, and replacements are getting harder to find, which increases costs. At the same time, organizations struggle to find people for hard-to-fill roles such as health and safety engineers, which can take twice as long to source and hire as assemblers, fabricators, and other line jobs.1
Manufacturing companies need talent today. But because employers will face a massive shortfall of labor if they can't attract more young and female talent away from other industries, they also need a plan to diversify their workforces for tomorrow. The following strategies can help organizations boost their recruitment.
Use career sites to build positive perceptions
In the United States, there's considerable nostalgia for manufacturing as a profession. In fact, an overwhelming majority of respondents in one survey see manufacturing as "very important or important to maintaining . . . America's economic prosperity" and "Americans' standard of living," and more than three-fourths agreed that "the US should further invest in the manufacturing industry." 2
In spite of this widespread positive perception, though, manufacturing recruiters face a huge challenge: convincing people that manufacturing is both good for the country and right for them personally.Many people don't ever consider manufacturing as a career, primarily because they have an outdated image of the industry. Employers that can tap into people's pride for homegrown manufacturing and connect it to a modern, compelling employer brand put themselves in an excellent position to recruit the quality, diverse workforce they need today and for years to come. This means highlighting cutting-edge technologies, offering competitive compensation and benefits, having a strong company culture, taking pride in the company's products, supporting local communities, and putting safety first. Well-executed career sites can accomplish all this and more because they are designed to excite, inform, and encourage applications. A few key elements can increase a career site's effectiveness:
Feature employee testimonials. Ask high-performing individuals (especially those who originally came from outside the industry) across the organization to share why they became interested in manufacturing. This can take place in an interview (perhaps recorded on video), or the employees can submit their responses in writing. Keep prompts and editing to a minimum to allow workers to speak in their own words.
Show off the organization's diversity. Manufacturers usually have strong ties with the areas in which they're located. Use pictures and videos to show employees at work, involved in team-building activities, or giving back to the community.
Make it easier to find relevant roles. Artificial intelligence can match job seekers to open roles based on criteria such as skills, leadership, and aptitude. Some applications can also mitigate bias by looking beyond where someone went to school or how many years of experience they have.
Increase workforce diversity
Manufacturers have long struggled to diversify their workforces. For example, even though men are 53 percent of the overall workforce in the United States, they "make up 71 percent of the manufacturing workforce."3
That workforce is also aging quickly, and large pockets of retirees will be difficult to replace unless the industry actively recruits groups that are typically underrepresented on the manufacturing floor—in particular, younger people, women, and minorities. Hiring strategies that mitigate bias (such as hiding names and photos on resumes) can help companies recruit a more diverse candidate pool.Manufacturing jobs, too, are changing. As automation increasingly becomes a part of manufacturing processes, employers require a different set of technical, in-demand skills. Employees with those skills may not look at manufacturers when considering the next step in their careers; therefore, it's up to employers to make job seekers aware of this option and champion the industry as an area in which they should want to work.
Invest in employee referrals
Effective recruitment teams don't find great people solely on their own but also leverage the employees they already have. Employee-referral technologies are relatively inexpensive to operate and result in the hiring of consistently high performers who typically stick with the company longer. (In fact, nearly one-third of companies say employee referrals are "a key source of quality hires."4
) Referral programs aren't perfect, though, and when problems arise recruitment teams need to address them:Common challenges |
Potential solutions |
| Referrals aren't top of mind for employees focused on their typical day-to-day duties. | Work with department heads and team leads to schedule periodic conversations about referrals. |
| Employees refer candidates outside existing, formal channels. | Ensure that the referral process is easy and that all employees understand how it works. (For example, pregenerated social posts make it easier for employees to share information about openings by giving them ideas to work with.) |
| Referrals are inconsistent across teams and fluctuate over time; participation is sporadic and hard to predict. | Employees may be unaware of openings outside their immediate teams or business units. Communicate open roles across the business regularly and incentivize participation. |
| Employees consistently report not knowing whom to refer, and few of the candidates they do refer are hired. | Pull employees' networks into a collective database (with their permission, of course), then use matching technology to pair potential candidates with current and projected openings. |
Avoid downtime by building robust talent pipelines
New safety precautions, increased demand, strained supply lines and logistics—2020 threw manufacturers more than a few curveballs, many of which have persisted in 2021. If all this wasn't enough, insufficient staffing can adversely affect a company's bottom line. Having the right employees with the right skills, credentials, experience, and certifications is essential to keeping production on schedule and avoiding wasteful downtime. The absence of just one key player from the floor during a shift can lead to major inefficiencies and serious financial headaches: for most manufacturers, a single hour of downtime can cost at least $100,000.5
A strong candidate relationship management (CRM) system can mitigate many of these issues. By keeping candidates engaged over time, CRM systems make it quicker, easier, and cheaper for companies to source qualified talent. The following strategies can help an organization build and engage a healthy talent pipeline:
Grow pipelines through outreach and communication. Encourage job seekers to opt into communications on the company's career site, LinkedIn page, and other digital sites. It's impossible to know what niche skills or certifications will be needed in the future, so be sure the pipelines also include silver-medalist candidates and other quality talent.
Organize pipelines based on hiring needs. Common categories include some combination of skills, experience level, and location.
Keep pipelines engaged. Send weekly digest e-mails to highlight job openings related to talent pools defined by candidates' interests. Job search advice, company news, and fun updates are all effective engagement tools.
Remove the stress from job offers
An employer's goal is to lock down candidates as quickly as possible while serious job seekers are likely juggling multiple job opportunities (each with its own timeline). By streamlining the process, cutting through red tape, and making negotiations easier, automating the job offer process can help companies trim days off this aspect of recruitment and beat their competition to the punch.
Onboard new manufacturing employees efficiently
With new hires who are great fits and eager to get started, digital onboarding builds on their excitement by reinforcing the culture and mission that drew them to the organization in the first place. New employees who start already engaged and set up for success usually have longer tenures and are happier, healthier team members. Efficient onboarding also helps organizations save money by reducing their time spent on administrative tasks.
Choose a dedicated applicant tracking system
Manufacturing recruiters work in two different worlds: one with high-volume roles, and one with hyper-specialized positions for which there are few candidates. In other to meet the needs of both, they should use applicant tracking systems that can support high-volume hiring, source niche talent, and move applicants with diverse skills, backgrounds, and credentials through the hiring process as quickly as possible.
As a critical sector of the national economy, the manufacturing industry need to fulfill its obligations of today and be prepared to adapt to the needs and demands of the future. Without appropriate staffing, though, the industry will struggle. To ensure that manufacturing can continue to play its important role, recruiters must develop and implement strategies to make sure the industry can attract and hire the talent it needs.
An Elevation of HR's Strategic Role
The third way blockchain will transform the operations of HR is by elevating HR's strategic position within the company. Even in the age of scaled HR, a lot of checking, double checking, inputting, background checking, modifying, and verifying is still taking place. Blockchain cuts the clerical work.
With more meaningfully structured data, different databases can share information in both human-readable and machine-readable layers. The effectiveness of AI systems to help predict retention risk, identify new skills, and plan succession would be much greater that it currently is.
The real-world applications of blockchain are just the first step in the transformation of HR. As powerful technology becomes more generally accessible, HR will be better positioned to manage disruption, to respond to growth opportunities, and to build a competitively skilled workforce for tomorrow's workplace.