Chris Russell (13)
career progression planning
The Benefits of Career Progression Planning
A decade ago, before Honeywell bought Sparta Systems, the company embarked on an aggressive growth program. With so many new hires and the tech company’s desire to keep its org chart as flat as possible, workers were understandably worried about their career advancement. To keep them engaged, Sparta Systems launched an equally aggressive career progression planning program that promoted lateral movement opportunities to round out future leaders and enable others to master new skills and explore new jobs within the company. This career progression planning involved customizing training and learning to meet not just the needs of the organization, but also the aspirations of each employee. In just a few years, the company’s annual loss of the talent Sparta didn’t want to lose plummeted to 1%, while the turnover rate fell below that of most of the rest of the industry. Modern Day Career Progression Planning Career progression planning, often called career pathing, used to mean the rungs on the corporate ladder. Today the process is broader, encompassing not just those expecting to become company managers and leaders, but those who want to improve their skills, take on new challenges or become subject matter experts in their current role. “Well-administered career progression [planning],” says The Croner Company, “is an effective means to help retain and continue to motivate key employees.” “The underlying mechanism of all such plans is the orderly movement of employees, either vertically to positions of greater responsibility or horizontally to positions encompassing a breadth of company functions.” A study by The Work Institute found a lack of career growth and development opportunity was the leading reason for voluntary turnover. It accounted for 21% of all reasons employees changed jobs in 2017, which was the 8th consecutive year it topped the list of the reasons for worker turnover. Four years later, it still led all other reasons for turnover. Leveraging Retention Retention of your best people is not the only benefit of career progression planning. When employees have opportunities to develop and grow in their skills and expertise, engagement improves and the more engaged workers an organization has the higher the productivity and the more competitive it is. Of equal benefit to the organization is having workers trained to move into the new jobs of the future. In the past, career progression planning was a time-consuming process that involved inventorying the skills and competencies of each job in the organization, then building development plans around each. Employees opted-in or were invited to participate in the program. Now, AI-enabled technology analyzes job roles and resumes and identifies next role candidates. The technology also builds the career path, detailing what skills each employee has and what they need to learn or improve for the next step, whether up or lateral. Writing in Forbes, Mahe Bayireddi, CEO of Phenom, a vendor in AI-enabled career pathing, explains, “By doing much of the heavy lifting, AI can efficiently match employees to suitable next-step positions based on their profiles.” All career progression planning must involve front line managers to encourage and coach their team members to investigate opportunities. Development programs must take into account the needs and strategic goals of the organization but be tailored to what employees need and want. “As career opportunities increase,” the Work Institute says, “Employers must take steps to understand the needs, preferences and goals of their workers or miss out on opportunities to keep workers that they need.” Bayireddi concludes his Forbes article with this: “Effective career progression plans will soon be the expectation, not the exception.” Contribution by John Zappe
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Recruiting
Recruiting KPIs to Improve the Talent Funnel
Recruiting KPIs — key performance indicators – are how organizations measure the effectiveness of their talent acquisition process and the performance of individual recruiters. KPIs are not exclusive to the recruiting and HR function. All departments and businesses have KPIs, even if they call them by some other name. Retailers, for example, measure “sales per square foot” and “customer retention,” among other KPIs. Restaurant KPIs include “revenue per available seat hour” and “table turn rate,” a metric that tells the manager how often new customers occupy a table. Typical Recruiting KPIs As with all other company operations, recruiting has multiple KPIs to measure different aspects of the talent acquisition function. The most familiar and most often used among them are these: Time to fill: The time from the point at which a recruiter receives the job requisition to the day the hired person starts work. Time to hire: The time from when a candidate first applies to the time they accept an offer. Cost per hire: The cost of making a hire. Quality of hire: How well the hire performs in the job. Diversity: The number of diversity candidates hired and as a percent of all hires. Source of hire: How did the person hired find out about the job. There are literally dozens of other KPIs. The larger and more data-driven the organization, the more likely it is to also include candidate and hiring manager satisfaction, conversion rates (the number of job seekers who after clicking into a job posting go on to apply), offer acceptance rate, and first months retention. Individual recruiter KPIs are similar to those for the entire talent acquisition function. In addition to the first four on our list, companies increasingly are including an individual diversity KPI in judging recruiter performance. Typically this includes the number of diverse candidates sourced, presented and hired. Recruiter KPIs also include individual productivity and effectiveness measures such as the number of open jobs each recruiter has on average, the number of interviews to offer and also to hire, and the number of jobs filled by the recruiter. What are the most important recruiting KPIs? Ask a dozen talent acquisition leaders and all of the ones we’ve highlighted will be on their list. Each will also have a number of other KPIs reflecting their importance to their organization and its strategic objectives. Companies looking to measure the effectiveness of their various recruitment marketing channels will want to know more than just the source of hire. They’ll look at where the applications are coming from and which of them yields the highest percentage of candidates selected for interviews. That KPI will be a source conversion rate. Other companies will want to evaluate the candidate experience. That KPI may be built around a measure of improvement in candidate satisfaction. Visier, the HR data analytics firm, lists KPIs to show the direct impact of talent acquisition on a company’s strategic goals. Such KPis as “revenue per employee,” “new hires that become innovators and top performers,” and the “dollar impact of recruiting on the business” require a high level of data sophistication, but are powerful tools for recruiting to demonstrate its importance to the organization. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it,” said management guru Peter Drucker. KPIs make it possible to measure an organization’s recruiting effectiveness and help improve it. By comparing an organization’s KPIs to those of others in the industry and to businesses generally, they serve as a scorecard, showing where the recruiting team is performing well and what needs improvement. Contribution by John Zappe
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Human Resources
Internal Mobility Is Now More Critical Than Ever
Employers waste millions of dollars each year recruiting when the best people for the jobs are often right under their nose. Deloitte tells us it costs a single large company upwards of $400 million in recruiting costs, training and lost productivity to replace workers. An internal mobility program would save $31 million by shaving just one point off the organization’s 13% turnover. The cost of turnover due to a lack of career development and internal mobility to just an average-sized company is $49 million, says Gartner, the global research and consulting firm. Retention and the savings it offers is a powerful incentive for companies to have a strong internal mobility program. In 2015, as recruiting talent was getting ever more difficult, Korn Ferry’s Futurestep found 87% of 1,189 corporate executives that a strong internal mobility program would “definitely help with attraction and retention efforts.” Remarkably, fewer than a third admitted their company had an internal mobility program. Fewer still use some kind of internal mobility software. If saving on recruiting new workers was the only benefit, that would be reason enough for every company – big or small – to have an internal mobility program. The benefits of a program are far greater than that. Dozens of research studies and surveys, and the experience of companies with robust internal mobility programs like Cisco, Ingersoll Rand and Vanguard, prove beyond a doubt that career development improves engagement, increases productivity, reduces turnover and enhances the employer brand. One of the seminal studies of internal mobility vs. external hiring found internal hires outperform external hires and stay longer. Ironically, those hired from within are paid 18% less than those hired externally. Cisco and the HR advisory and research firm Future Workplace found internal mobility programs improved: Employee engagement by 49% Productivity by 39% Employee teamwork 39% LinkedIn reported in in its Global Talents Trends 2020 that on average, employees stay 41% longer at companies that regularly hire from within. The Society of Human Resource Management says the retention benefits extend to workers who made a lateral move as well as those promoted up the ladder. With these kinds of benefits why don’t all companies have an internal mobility program? Deloitte says, “Creating a strong culture of internal mobility isn’t just about posting positions on an internal job site. It involves all leaders encouraging and supporting employees to develop the skills that prepare them for their next role, and creating a matching career plan. All too often, such efforts are largely absent.” The culture at more than a few companies discourages managers from hiring internally, seeing it as poaching rather than career development. Managers, too, resist losing their best workers. “While it’s hard to believe,” says Deloitte, “There are organizations where recruiters are told they cannot reach out to the employees within the company about a different role.” Even where an internal mobility program does exist, it’s often managed by HR functional areas such as learning and development, succession or career management. When talent acquisition is not included, recruiters may not think to look inside to fill a job. Josh Bersin, a globally recognized leader and analyst in talent management, says the worker shortages of the last several years and the pandemic that forced companies to do business differently and redeploy people into new or different jobs made internal mobility more critical than ever. “It’s time for companies to provide employees with agile, personalized mobility that helps them move their careers into the right direction while meeting organizational needs with talent from within their own walls.” Contribution by John Zappe
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Recruiting Tactics
Intro to WhatsApp Recruitment
In a U.S. centric recruiting world, most talent professionals have ignored the most popular instant messaging app when it comes to recruitment. I’m talking about WhatsApp. It is used by many of companies to connect with consumers, but WhatsApp recruitment also has major benefits. Recruiters can easily leverage WhatsApp to connect with candidates on their terms in a channel they use every day. For starters, WhatsApp has two billion users – 2 billion! WhatsApp is a simple (and reliable) way to communicate and share information on a popular, widely available platform that boasts very high engagement. Its users don’t need to change their phone numbers or ISP to connect with people on it, which makes it ideal for global recruitment communication. So, now that you know about WhatsApp’s power and reach, let’s look at some reasons that you should make WhatsApp recruitment part of your overall strategy. Where Your Candidates Are More than 1 million people join WhatsApp each day. In addition, the average user checks WhatsApp 23 times per day! Talk about candidate engagement and “fishing where the fish are”. Sending your candidates a quick WhatsApp message will surely help you recruit faster in a medium they are already using. So instead of a cold email, go the texting or WhatsApp messaging route. Branding A lot of companies over-think the recruiting process, putting too many hoops in front of candidates. A WhatsApp recruiting strategy cuts through the clutter through simple, direct communication. WhatsApp for Business allows you to create a business profile with helpful information for your customers like your address, business description, email address, and website. So use it to link to your career site and leverage the profile to extend your employer brand messaging. It’s Global For large multinational businesses with a global footprint, WhatsApp Recruitment is a no brainer. WhatsApp is the #1 messaging app in over 100 countries, making it one of the most effective platforms you can find to engage with diverse candidates from around the world. It’s also won’t break your budget. Quick Tip Set an away message when you are unable to answer so your candidates know when to expect a response. You can also create a greeting message to introduce potential candidates to your career site URL. At Emissary we will soon be releasing support for seamless Whatsapp recruitment, so customers will be able to message via the platform as easily as they can send a text. Marketers often use the term omni-channel to describe their outreach efforts and talent professionals should follow the same playbook. The more you can go to where candidates are to spread your message and interact, the more efficient your recruiting efforts will become. It will take time and effort, but such is the life for recruiters these days. Hiring never stops. WhatsApp recruiting can give you the edge you need.
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Recruiting Tactics
Writing Job Descriptions for Attracting Quality Talent
92% of small businesses say they get few or no qualified applicants. So how can you change that dynamic? Better job descriptions may help. Hiring quality talent has never been easy, but since the Great Recession ended a decade ago the difficulty has multiplied. Now, as the headline statistics above suggest, the COVID pandemic had made it harder still to hire workers with the skills employers want. To entice candidates to apply, employers are offering signing bonuses and referral fees, sweetened benefits and pay and flexible schedules and remote work. Yet too many are overlooking one, simple and inexpensive way to attract applicants – a better job description. Writing job descriptions for attracting quality talent gets too little attention, yet for the majority of candidates, it’s the job description that makes them decide to apply or move on to the next opportunity. The Job Description is an Advertisement Talent management strategist Dorothy Dalton laments that most job descriptions don’t get changed much, while jobs do. When an opening comes up, the job description from the last time is dusted off and reposted. “Generally the only changes I see are to inflate the qualifications.” Ongig, a job description technology company, tells us there are at least a dozen reasons why a job description fails. Job titles are too long or too obscure. A majority begin by telling potential candidates about the company rather than the job. Too many read as if written by lawyers and are too complicated or impersonal. Others are too long. Still others are laden with gender-biased language like “go-getter,” “dominant” and “champion.” Writing job descriptions for attracting quality talent isn’t difficult. It starts with an appreciation of some of the science behind what gets a candidate interested in actually reading a job post, which, of course, is the first step in getting them to apply. LinkedIn says job seekers spend less than 50 seconds deciding if a job is a fit. They spend well over a minute reading through one that appears to match their interests and skills. The first place they look is the job title. If it’s more than 60 characters – that’s characters, not words – few candidates will click it to apply, according to an analysis by Appcast, a global recruitment ad placement company. The same is true if the title is shorter than 20 characters. LinkedIn points out that words like “wizard,” “rock star,” and “guru” in the title may be cute, but they don’t give a job seeker anything specific about the job. “Data Analyst” is more effective than “Data Guru” because it’s immediately clear what the job is. “A poorly written job title might puzzle the candidate so much that they don’t click through to read your job description,” explains Ongig. The Long and Short of Job Titles Just as job titles can be too long or too short, Appcast found the same applies to job descriptions. The sweet spot to get the highest percentage of candidates to click to apply are job descriptions between 4,000 and 5,000 characters. That’s around 500 words. Ironically, ZipRecruiter found the average job posting in 2019 was 70% longer than it was in 2016. That’s not necessarily a negative if the job descriptions were too short in the past and now provide more specific and helpful information. Even more important to writing job descriptions for attracting quality talent are the qualifications. The issue of qualification inflation is a key obstacle to getting candidates to apply. One of the leading studies of the issue by the Harvard Business School compares the educational requirements in job postings with those held by the people actually doing the work. In just one example, the researchers found that 67% of the job postings for production supervisor asked for a college degree. Yet, of those doing the job – foremen and other first line managers — only 16% had a degree. “By engaging in degree inflation, employers restrict their access to a wider pool of talent in several ways,” the report says. “Postings for many jobs traditionally viewed as middle-skills jobs now stipulate a college degree as a minimum education requirement, while only a third of the adult population possesses this credential.” It isn’t just education requirements that are inflated. ZipRecruiter’s study of the millions of its job postings found that as the unemployment rate was creeping lower between 2016 and 2018, employers were including more skills in their requirements. Not only does this narrow the pool of qualified candidates, it has an effect on who will apply for the job. Women won’t apply for a job unless they meet most or all of the qualifications. Men will apply if they meet 60%. In writing job descriptions for attracting quality talent the first step should be to analyze what qualifications are really necessary. Remember that headline at the beginning of this article about tech executives worrying they won’t find enough qualified people to hire? CNBC’s survey found they’re adopting hiring strategies that are an about face from their past practice. Besides instituting training and apprenticeships, a quarter are eliminating academic requirements, while 42% are rewriting their job descriptions and titles entirely. To interest more candidates and get more applicants, update those job descriptions to bring them into line with what’s really needed to do the job. Tighten up the inflationary skills and requirements, use gender-neural language and keep your job titles clear and short. Be specific about what the job is, but avoid delivering a laundry list of tasks. Instead, prioritize what’s crucial and what makes the job fulfilling. Writing job descriptions for attracting quality talent should be like speaking to the candidate as if they were right there in front of you. Spell out the good (and the not so good) aspects of the job to paint a realistic picture for potential candidates. When possible also use imagery and graphics to highlight the job in action. It’s a visual web and sometime job writers forget the appeal of pictures and images to sell the role. Contributions by John Zappe
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Human Resources
What Is People Analytics?
BBVA, USA, a large, regional bank knew turnover was a problem. It was clear from the HR reports. But before they could address it, the HR team first had to know what jobs and where was attrition the greatest. For the answers, they turned to people analytics. Analytics identified the jobs most at risk and the branches for the biggest share of the turnover. Armed with that knowledge, BBVA developed a plan targeting those jobs and those branches, and cut turnover almost in half. Impact like that is why people analytics is becoming such a key part of human resources. But just what is people analytics? Or, as it’s also called, talent analytics, workforce analytics and HR analytics. Defining People Analytics It’s the collection and analysis of HR and organizational data to provide insights into problems or practices with the objective of improving business performance. Some answers to what is people analytics are broader, taking into account external data such as industry benchmarks. Toolbox goes even further defining it as “the deeply data-driven and goal-focused method of studying all people processes, functions, challenges, and opportunities at work to elevate these systems and achieve sustainable business success.” However it’s defined, global analytics consultant David Green says in LinkedIn’s 2020 talent trends report, “Providing insights to support better decision-making is the key purpose of people analytics.” The pharmaceutical firm Johnson & Johnson put that to the test a few years ago. Company recruiters were shifting away from recent college grads in favor of hiring more experienced workers. Acting on instinct, recruiting teams claimed experienced hires made better workers and stayed longer. HR leaders weren’t convinced. So they turned to their people analytics group, which found the recruiters were wrong. New grads not only performed almost as well as the seasoned workers, but they actually stayed longer. The analysis, explained the head of the people analytics team, “dispelled a myth in our organization.” After the analysis was reported, college hiring jumped by 20%. Results like that – and there are many, even more dramatic such as an IBM attrition project that saved the company $300 million – are making people analytics a core HR function. Now, instead of asking “What is people analytics?” HR leaders and C-suite executives are asking how to implement analytics. A study published in Journal of Organizational Effectiveness People and Performance, declared: “By 2025, HR analytics will have become an established discipline, will have a proven impact on business outcomes, and will have a strong influence in operational and strategic decision making.” LinkedIn’s survey of HR professionals found almost three-quarters believe people analytics “will be a major priority for their company over the next 5 years.” Still, a majority of these professionals admit they “need help putting basic people analytics into practice.” Perhaps for that reason, the analytics consultancy Millan Chicago, sees “the gradual mainstreaming of people analytics” as the most important trend in analytics this year. “As businesses begin to realize the critical importance of data, investing in analytics will no longer become something ‘shiny and new,’ but rather a business essential.” Instead of asking “what is people analytics,” HR leaders are recognizing what people analytics has done to improve business performance wherever it’s been adopted and are hastening to do the same for their organization. John Zappe, contributed to this article.
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Human Resources
Offboarding Process Tips
Think for a moment about how much time and effort go into recruiting and onboarding the talented people you hire. How does that compare to what you invest in their eventual offboarding? With very few exceptions, the offboarding process is almost an afterthought. According to research by Aberdeen, only 29% of companies have a formal offboarding program. Even then, many of those are little more than checklists of the paperwork that needs to be completed by the departing employee. Other research by the business strategy consulting company SBI found HR professionals invest 8x more time developing and managing onboarding programs than they do on offboarding. Why does this matter? Because a good offboarding process tips the scales in favor of the employer when it comes to – surprise! – retention and recruiting. Employees who leave an employer feeling good about the way their exit was handled are much more likely to refer others to the company, leave positive reviews, mentor their replacements and return as boomerangs. “A well-managed offboarding process can turn employees into loyal alumni who become customers, suppliers, boomerang employees, mentors to current workers and ambassadors for the firm,” said Erin Makarius, associate professor of management at the University of Akron in Ohio, an author of a report this spring in the Harvard Business Review. An array of studies and research don’t just detail the importance of offboarding, they analyze the value, offering specific offboarding process tips to help HR teams develop the kind of programs that create brand ambassadors of former employees. Most employers already have procedures for handling the legal requirements and other basics. A successful offboarding program goes beyond that, says Makarius and his co-author, Alison M. Dachner, associate professor at John Carroll University. Here are some of the more valuable of the offboarding process tips compiled from their report and others. Treat exiting employees with respect. This is as true for those involuntarily terminated as for those leaving on their own. Resist the temptation to make a show of hustling fired employees out of the building. Affording everyone a measure of respect will help avoid the bad feelings that can lead to negative reviews, dissension in the ranks and possible lawsuits. Create an alumni group. Think of your departing workers not as ex-employees, but as a valuable resource. Just as a university engages its grads, stay in touch with your alumni. Keep them up-to-date with news about the company and about each other. In addition to using social media – many alumni groups exist on Facebook — a periodic newsletter serves as an extra way to communicate. Alumni are also a valuable resource to take on contract work or special projects. Exit interviews. In high-performing companies, these interviews are analyzed and the results reported up the chain. They are an invaluable tool for uncovering problem managers and cultural shortcomings, if they are acted upon. Recognizing the reluctance of departing employees to burn bridges, many companies will conduct an exit interview at the time of departure, then follow-up with the employee 30 or 60 days later. Mentorship. Positioning the training of an employee’s replacement as a mentorship is a more positive and enduring way of ensuring a knowledge transfer. Asking the departing worker to help with the transition and giving them the support to do that, will often make for a smoother handoff with the mentorship extending into the alumni phase of the relationship. The internet has no shortage of offboarding process tips. A search for “offboarding process” brings up thousands of results including multiple checklists of the legal and practice steps. Meeting those requirements is important and has to be a part of any offboarding process. The offboarding process tips here, though, go the heart of a company’s culture. A strong culture, the kind that has talent wanting to join you, doesn’t end with the last paycheck. Your alumni may be tomorrow’s boomerang employees and certainly you want them to be today’s brand ambassadors. ### Contribution by John Zappe ###
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Recruiting
Recruiter Ghosting Is Damaging Your Employer Brand
Recruiter ghosting has become so common and so widespread that to call it an epidemic is an understatement. And it is damaging employer brands by perpetuating the resume black hole that most job seekers experience. Just look what one candidate said on Reddit recently; After hundreds of applications and a few interviews, I can see that recruiter ghosting is at an all time high. The second they determine you’re of no use to them, then all communication stops. I’m tempted to build a site where ppl can post their ghosting experience. Maybe if they were publically shamed then they’d change their behavior? Borrowed from online dating, the term “ghosting” describes the situation when a candidate – or an employer – simply stops communicating without explanation. It’s different from the well-known black hole where a job seeker applies but hears nothing, not even an acknowledgement of the application. In ghosting, a conversation has actually begun between candidate and employer. Recruiters have done it for years but only in the past few years have candidates taken it up in earnest thanks to robust hiring. Ghosting was already an irritant in 2019, when the global jobs aggregator Indeed.com called it an epidemic in a report on the phenomenon. Now in its latest study, Indeed tells us ghosting has all but exploded. 28% of job seekers have ghosted an employer, says Indeed, up from 18% in the 2019 survey. About half just stopped communicating with a hiring manager. That’s troubling enough, but 7% said they went through the entire hiring process, accepted an offer, but then didn’t show up for work. As surprising as that may be, employers have done worse. 77% of job seekers say they’ve been ghosted by an employer. Stunningly, 10% report being ghosted by an employer after receiving a job offer. If you suspect a bit of job seeker exaggeration may have crept into the results, consider that 73% of employers in the study admitted to ghosting candidates in just the last year. It’s a sign, says Indeed, “that ghosting has become standard practice in the hiring process — even though it creates a terrible candidate experience and can threaten a company’s employer brand,” says Indeed. Why is this happening? Writing about the ghosting trend, executive recruiter and search firm founder Jack Kelly points the finger at society generally and the depersonalization of hiring specifically. “A combination of deploying technology, an unfortunate rise in incivility in our country and the ease of applying to jobs has made the job search experience cold and impersonal — resulting in the sudden rise in ghosting,” he writes in Forbes. A more generous Laura Mazzullo, founder and owner of a recruiting firm that places HR professionals, suspects it’s not so much intentional incivility, but fear of confrontation that causes hiring managers and recruiters to ghost candidates. Commenting in a recent article on the Society for Human Resource Management website, Mazzullo says, “That fear paralyzes them from even sending an e-mail. The fear is all about ‘How will the other person respond? What if they hang up on me? What if they yell at me? What if they’re disappointed in me? What if they give me a long, undesired sales pitch to try and change my mind?’” Ghosting employers, on the other hand, is more common among younger workers who have grown up with anonymous review sites and dating apps where ghosting is common, even accepted. “Younger job seekers have ghosting experience from dating apps, and from growing up texting — or not replying to texts that might lead to hard conversations,” speculated Robin Rosenberg, a clinical psychologist and CEO of a company that focused on workplace bias and incivility. “It’s possible that younger job candidates prefer ghosting to having conversations, even if employers weren’t ghosting.” Whatever the reason, ghosted employers hold the upper hand. Indeed’s survey found that nearly all but a handful of employers track ghosters. Indeed says 26% of employers track those who stopped responding and 35% track those who don’t show up for an interview. A third make notes about those who don’t show up after being hired. Recruiters who ghost however are not doing any favors for your employer brand. Companies need to make sure that each of their recruiters close the loop with the proper rejection email to ensure their reputation remains intact. Otherwise you risk rants like the Reddit example above.
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Recruiting Tactics
Manufacturing Recruitment Strategies
Manufacturers, like most other employers, are facing critical hiring shortages across the country. Yesterday’s recruitment tactics are no longer sufficient for moving the needle in hiring so it’s time to change things up and rethink your strategy. Part of the problem is that manufacturing is not perceived as a desirable career path. Today’s workforce still has a negative perception of these jobs. Automation is replacing some workers and many people just don’t want to get their hands dirty in these types of work environments. Manufacturing Workers are Aging Out Where will the next generation of manufacturing workers come from? A recent study by Deloitte reports that 2.7 million manufacturing/industrial workers are expected to retire in the next 10 years. On top of that, another report shows that manufacturing work ranked last in career choices in workers aged 19-33! That’s a huge problem for manufacturing recruiters. Especially when you consider that hundreds of thousands of jobs are projected to be created in the next few years. I read somewhere that it currently takes 70-75 days on average to find and recruit skilled manufacturing workers. Throw in a global pandemic and you can actually feel the challenge employers face. Rethinking Manufacturing Recruitment Here’s what I think manufacturers need to do to begin to fix these problems; Change the perception of manufacturing among job seekers Get creative in sourcing and talent attraction Leverage the latest and great recruitment technologies Use Employer Branding to Change the Perception Changing the perception begins with establishing an employer brand built around the purpose of the products you produce. Why does your company exist? What value do your products offer? Answering these important questions will help you explain the value of a job at your company. For example if you are a defense manufacturer you can highlight how a job at your firm helps keep our country safe. Or if you are a food manufacturer you can tout how you help keep us fed. Playing to job seekers basic emotions will help you communicate your EVP (employer value proposition) in an effort to appeal to them. Rinse and Repeat Your Employer Brand Once you’ve established the right employer brand messaging, take that message out into the communities you recruit in. Build relationships with local high schools and colleges. Educate them on a career in your industry. You’ll have to think long term as well. It will not happen overnight. Consider forming an apprenticeship program to help take students and give them the training they need to become a full time employee one day. You’ve got to establish a pipeline of talent for the future. And keep that pipeline going day after day. Use Your Employees to Tell the Story Companies must also leverage their employees in helping shape perception of working for you in a manufacturing job. Highlight their stories, show them in action through video and let them speak about why they enjoy the job. Today’s generation appreciates authenticity, especially delivered in a video format. Embrace social media as well. You should be on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. These channels will help you create visually appealing content which will make your company an attractive place to work. Sourcing Manufacturing Talent Employers should also step up their direct sourcing efforts if they want to hire faster. This means everything from boolean searches online to virtual/in-person job fairs to billboards located near your competition. Souring platforms like Hiretual and Seekout are good places to start actively searching for talent. One of my favorite (and free) sourcing tools is called Recruitem. It’s a boolean search tool that helps you find talent by keywords across the internet, mainly using Google to do it. There are a handful of manufacturing job boards and communities you can also tap for talent. JobsinManufacturing.com – LINK ManufacturingJobs.com – LINK WomenIn Manufacturing – LINK Association For Manufacturing Excellence – LINK Install New Recruitment Technology Lastly, manufacturers need to upgrade their existing recruiting technology stacks to the most modern ones possible. Your outdated ATS needs to be replaced with something fast and ‘apply’ friendly. Candidates need to be able to apply in just a few minutes, they should be able to opt in via text message,and be able to self schedule interviews (as long as they meet basic qualifications). Implementing these ideas and strategies is no small task and will take time, so employers will need to show patience. But if you expect to succeed in the long term to win the manufacturing war for talent, they are mandatory changes that need to be put in place today.
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