Manufacturing Recruiting

Explore the manufacturing recruitment process steps and find out how specialized recruiting companies can help relieve HR of recruitment tasks and ensure jobs are filled quickly and efficiently.

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NCW has 22+ years of helping companies like yours find the right people to do the job efficiently and effectively. Our focus is on creating lasting partnerships ensuring that your team can keep crucial projects on track. With our services, you can save time and resources allowing you to focus on important tasks for your team.

Finding the right people for the job matters to us because we know how crucial it is for your team to stay moving. That’s why our recruiters are focused on finding qualified and experienced individuals in the construction, manufacturing, supply chain, and accounting industries.

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Leverage this service as a “working interview” allowing you to find the best employees to fit with your team’s needs.

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Our team acts as an extension to HR and talent acquisition departments, bringing customized hiring solutions to achieve desired outcomes.

What Others Are Saying About NCW

“Using NCW to help with our talent has kept our business moving forward and productive.”

Holly P.

Operations Director

“NCW brings reliability, consistency, and great communications to the projects that we do together.”

Jared F.

Superintendent

“Using NCW to help with our talent has kept our business moving forward and productive.”

Holly P.

Operations Director

“NCW brings reliability, consistency, and great communications to the projects that we do together.”

Jared F.

Superintendent

Manufacturing Recruiting

Many industries rely on recruiters to supply them with a steady influx of capable and qualified candidates to fill open positions. Recruiting manufacturing employees is a similar process to any other industry. However, manufacturing recruiting faces some challenges that other industries do not face. Some of the specific challenges that manufacturing recruiters face include the following:

Negative stereotypes about manufacturing positions
Unfortunately, the manufacturing industry tends to have an image to overcome, especially in younger generations and women. A 2018 study by Deloitte found that 45% of individuals in that demographic avoided manufacturing positions due to negative perceptions of the industry.
Specialized skillsets or required previous experience
Additionally, many manufacturing positions require specific skill sets, which can be difficult to acquire outside of the industry. That can make recruitment in manufacturing industry positions difficult, especially for entry-level positions.
An increase in automation
Manufacturing jobs are currently disproportionately impacted by the increased use of automation in the workplace. Since many entry-level positions are being replaced by automation, the positions that do require skilled laborers are difficult to fill because entry-level employees no longer have the opportunity to learn the skills necessary for skilled labor on the job.

It can be difficult for on-site managers to hire skilled laborers because of the intense time and energy required to market the position, schedule and conduct interviews, and perform other tasks that go along with filling positions. It can be incredibly useful for manufacturing companies to outsource recruiting jobs to professionals like NCW, who have years of experience sourcing and filling positions in the manufacturing industry.

When tackling the talent gap in employee recruiting, it’s important that hiring organizations and their recruiting partners take a sustainable approach to sourcing candidates and filling positions. For starters, an ongoing employee retention problem can seriously impact any recruiter’s ability to bring on qualified candidates for an open position. It’s important that hiring organizations or their partners create a positive perception of the workplace and the position to be filled.

Additionally, manufacturing recruiters also list competition from other offers as one of their top hiring challenges. Because skilled workers are becoming more scarce, top organizations are willing to do more to win candidates over. This is a great opportunity for the candidate in question as it gives them more options, but it does present a challenge for employers. That’s why hiring organizations and recruiters need to consider the holistic experience of candidates during the recruitment process.

Manufacturing organizations and their recruiting partners should work together to ensure that they are finding the best candidates for their open positions. The considerations of the best candidates should also extend beyond skills – there are many factors that influence long-time employee satisfaction and retention, including company culture and overall compensation.

The recruitment process in manufacturing industry positions can be very different from other types of recruiting and job seeking, especially the direct hire process. The manufacturing recruitment process may vary slightly depending on which side of the process you’re on. If you’re a hiring organization, the recruitment process might look like working closely with a talent acquisition agency like NCW to establish ideal candidate criteria and then following NCW’s lead to hiring. If you’re a job seeker hoping to utilize a recruiting agency for permanent or temporary employment, the first step is finding the right recruiting agency for you. It’s important to select an agency that has experience with your industry. This is especially true for factory worker recruitment, selection, and training.

It’s important that recruiters have a familiarity with the industry, especially in the manufacturing and factory worker recruitment process. If there isn’t a solid basis of knowledge there, the likelihood of a mismatched position or quick employee turnover is high. The recruitment, selection, and training of employees can take a significant amount of time, so it’s important to get it right the first time.

The four basic recruitment process steps are:

Opening the position
Screening the candidates
Interviewing qualified applicants
Selecting the best candidates from interviews
Offering the position

While that might seem simple on paper, there is a lot more that goes into the hiring process than those five steps. If done incorrectly, employers may open a position and not receive a single applicant – or they might receive so many that they couldn’t possibly screen all of them, and the position goes unfilled anyway. This is where recruiting professionals like NCW come in. The manufacturing industry in particular sometimes requires some creative recruiting ideas to fill positions quickly and with qualified candidates.

Some creative recruitment process examples might include making every employee a recruiter – offering referral bonuses can lead to qualified candidates in a manner that is quicker and more cost-effective than other methods of recruiting. Recruiters working for an agency should be able to easily communicate an employer brand to a candidate in a way that makes them want to stick with the hiring process. Presenting an employer’s brand to a candidate in a way that is friendly, accessible, and stable is important in manufacturing, as many recruiters work to break down barriers to employment in the manufacturing industry.

Recruitment Process Steps

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Recruiting Agencies

A recruiting agency is a company that is built with the goal of partnering with hiring organizations to source candidates for open positions. A recruiter is someone who works with a recruiting agency to match skilled workers with appropriate positions. Some specialized agencies have recruiters who fill manufacturing recruiting jobs.

HR is spread too thin to focus on sourcing quality candidates in a timely manner
HR departments in manufacturing are often smaller departments that are responsible for payroll, employee upskilling and reskilling, training initiatives, employee retention, and more. When it comes to finding new candidates for open positions, it is often one of the last things on HR’s list of priorities. Outsourcing recruiting to a production staffing agency can help relieve HR of some tasks as well as ensure that jobs are filled quickly and efficiently.
HR departments often do not have the marketing skills required to tackle manufacturing’s image problem when it comes to technical recruiting.
Overcoming a complicated and negative reputation is a difficult thing to do, even for the most experienced branding professionals. Not many HR personnel are trained in branding, marketing, and other techniques on how to overcome stereotypes that come up during the hiring process. Recruiters should be able to work together with HR and the hiring organization to put their best foot forward as an employer brand.

Some recruiting trends in manufacturing include:

Moving to digital connection strategies
While manufacturing doesn’t have a reputation for being high-tech (or at least, it didn’t use to be), many recruiters are switching to digital tools like texting to source and communicate with potential candidates. This is especially useful when trying to attract younger workers, as they are more accustomed to digital communication. This might look like using social media to promote open listings or even texting candidates to schedule interviews rather than calling them.
Cultivating an engaging candidate experience
Many recruiters are using AI-enabled tools to create an efficient hiring process that keeps candidates fully engaged and is respectful of the time and energy they put into competing for a position. Critical factors that contribute to a positive candidate experience include prompt and concise communication, a simplified application process, uncomplicated scheduling, and a short turnaround time from application to hire. It’s not uncommon for the hiring process to take up to a month in other industries – that is not flying in manufacturing!

Best Recruiting Companies

Manufacturing industry trends are changing rapidly, and HR best practices in manufacturing industry hiring need to change with them. In order for the best recruiting companies to truly make a difference with their manufacturing clients, they need to take a few important steps to go the extra mile. Part of that is using creative ways to recruit manufacturing employees.

As we mentioned in the recent trends of the manufacturing recruiting section, using digital tools like texting and social media can make a big difference in reaching previously underrepresented candidates. Speaking of underrepresentation, manufacturing candidates are also caring more about DEI initiatives in 2023 than in previous years. In fact, 44% of candidates have turned down job offers due to a lack of diversity in the workplace, according to the Association of Equipment Manufacturers.

One of the best ways to recruit manufacturing employees is to build a steady pipeline of talent. This is easiest to do when working with a recruiting agency, as they will build and maintain a pipeline of skilled and talented candidates they can call on when searching to fill positions. When searching for qualified candidates, it is important to look at who has been interviewed in the past for similar positions. Candidates who were not available than may be available now, or their circumstances may have changed to become an even more compelling candidates.

Salary and compensation also play an important role in any hiring process. As the talent pool of skilled and qualified candidates shrink, many manufacturing recruiter salary offers are forced to be higher than what they would normally offer. Not only that, but the newest generation of workers cares more about compensation than any other employment factor. However, it’s not enough to just offer the highest dollar. Many new recruits into manufacturing (and any industry) value work-life balance and flexibility in their roles. Many Gen-Z workers in manufacturing would even change jobs for more time off and flexible scheduling options. Learning what is important to certain generations and knowing how to leverage that information in a recruitment process can help external and internal recruiters acquire skilled and talented candidates.

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