Written by Trevor McGlochlin, Research Consultant
Attracting and hiring the right person for a job is central to the success of any organisation. By hiring the right people, plants can improve productivity, teamwork, workplace safety, production quality and volume, and in the end, profitability. With so many hiring decisions and options, identifying the best process can be difficult. A well-defined hiring process not only helps direct the right candidates to your open positions, but also helps you select the right employees. This saves time and money by reducing the time spent searching for employees as well as the need to replace and train new people who were not a good fit.
Here are three unique strategies to use in your manufacturing hiring process to get the right people in the door.
Use manufacturing simulations in your hiring process
Candidates applying to manufacturing jobs often have never performed that job before. While they may have experience with similar manufacturing positions, a similar job may require very different knowledge, skills, and abilities to perform the job well. Depending on the type of simulation, it can provide hiring managers with a good measurement of the candidate’s potential in performing well in the job.
The simulation could be an online assessment measuring the soft skills needed for a manufacturing job or it could be a more hands-on physical simulation that measures the hard skills need to perform well. Both are important in showing the full, complete potential of a candidate. PSI offers several online testing simulations as well as physical production simulations for selection in manufacturing.
Incorporate a Realistic Job Preview in your application process
While an online or physical simulation can be an effective way to give a candidate a realistic preview of what the job will be like, it can be costly. This is because, by the time candidates have advanced to the online testing or physical on-site testing for a given position, the manufacturing organisation has already invested money in that individual. If a candidate gets to this stage in the hiring process assuming the job will be one type of work, only to realise in the assessment phase that it is completely different, they have the potential to drop out. They could also have a bad taste in their mouth after wasting time and effort for a job they never really wanted.
In order to save the organisation money and maintain a better candidate experience, a realistic job preview during the application process could be the innovative answer. This is where the real innovation should come in. Currently, many job descriptions have a job preview in the form of text that doesn’t quite paint the “realistic” part of a realist job preview. This could be accomplished with a video of individuals working in various jobs that are very similar, an image carousel depicting relevant job tasks, or it could be real employees talking about their day-to-day routines in the target job.
Make your manufacturing hiring process mobile-friendly
People use their phone for everything, including finding and applying for jobs. There are several different areas where the hiring process can be more mobile-friendly for manufacturing. Here are just a few:
- Recruiting – Innovative mobile recruiting applications are everywhere. These can help recruiters continue to be innovative and enhance their recruitment process. Read more about How a Mobile-First Assessment Process Impacts Recruitment.
- Job Posting – Make sure that the job boards where you post are also mobile-friendly so that you’re not missing out on a large percentage of top talent that only look at job postings on their phones.
- Applications – Manufacturing organisations can really get ahead of the game if they adopt innovative, easy, and painless mobile applications. This will make the applicant experience better and build a great organisational reputation among those individuals that don’t make it to the next step in the hiring process.
Other areas that could be innovated with mobile enhancements include candidate communication, online assessments, interviewing, background checks, job offers, and on-boarding.
PSI has worked with many manufacturing clients to make changes like these to their hiring processes, and these organisations have seen that the efficiency of their hiring process was significantly improved. There are many other enhancements HR teams can make across the board to improve hiring and retention. In our new guide, our team of experts outlines solutions to common challenges organisations face in selecting high-quality manufacturing employees.
