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HR Lessons Learned: Hiring Takeaways from 5 Different Industries

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Talent acquisition is one of the most critical yet challenging undertakings for any business. Companies in many sectors face a shortage of workers today; they face stiff competition to hire applicants—any applicant. At the same time, hiring managers in other sectors must sift through a surplus of applications to find the best candidate.

In 2020, 74 percent of CEOs globally were concerned about the availability of key skills, with 32 percent being “extremely concerned.” There’s sufficient reason behind these concerns, too. A successful hire can extend a business’s value, while a poor selection can represent a considerable waste of resources.

As you can imagine, HR teams and recruiters are looking for ways to solve this problem. And many look for help in this area by turning to other industries. For example, what are companies in tech doing to improve efficiencies in hiring practices? How are organizations in the manufacturing sector, many of which are struggling through a long-term labor shortage, meeting this challenge?

To answer those questions, let’s look at standard hiring practices in five sectors at both ends of the labor spectrum. Perhaps by reviewing the HR lessons learned in each, your company can learn how to optimize your talent acquisition strategy.

1. Technology: Pre-employment Testing

The technology industry is one of the most rapidly growing sectors today. It also involves a high level of specialization and expertise, and as such, has had to develop similarly specialized hiring methods. Most notably, tech companies frequently rely on pre-employment tests.

In the tech sector, an applicant’s education and occupational background isn’t always the most reliable evidence of their skills or aptitude. The tech industry has recognized this, and so businesses frequently require applicants to take a skills assessment. These tests offer more conclusive proof of a candidate’s aptitude in a company’s specific needed skills.

The downside to pre-employment testing is that it’s time-consuming. The more in-depth the assessment, the longer it will delay the hiring process. If companies can afford that time, though, borrowing this practice from the tech sector can produce impressive results.

2. Healthcare: Artificial Intelligence

The medical sector has an 18.7 percent turnover rate, so healthcare companies need to recruit new workers quickly. Consequently, many organizations have turned to artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline the hiring process.

The healthcare industry has a history of using AI to increase medication adherence and more, so applying it to hiring was a natural step. Hospitals use it to automate tedious, repetitive tasks like interview scheduling and application screening. One of the HR lessons learned here is that automation gets promising applicants to the interview stage of hiring quicker, helping speed the journey from application to onboarding.

AI hiring tools are relatively new, but their impact is snowballing in many hiring sectors. With AI, larger businesses in various industries have found solutions that streamline their hiring processes by automating several recruiter and candidate tasks. As technology advances, these tools will be able to do even more to help the hiring process–and they’ll also be more available (and affordable) to smaller businesses.

3. Manufacturing: Passive Candidate Search

Manufacturing companies have had to work with an ongoing labor shortage for years. With fewer people entering the industry, manufacturers have had to find new avenues for recruiting workers. One of the most effective of these strategies has been searching for passive candidates.

Businesses have found that many manufacturing professionals are hard to find because they’re not actively looking for a new job. These workers don’t often apply independently. Given the right opportunity, however, they could be willing to switch careers or positions. Scouring databases of nearby workers, industry-related forums, and other data sources to find these employees helps manufacturers find ideal candidates.

Other industries facing labor shortages can employ the same tactic. After all, sometimes the best employees aren’t actively looking for new work. Until a better offer comes along, that is.

4. Real Estate: Mentorship

Success in the real estate sector often requires experience and intimate industry knowledge. While many companies’ reaction to this hiring environment would be to look for outside, experienced hires, many brokerages take a different approach. Instead of finding already-knowledgeable employees, real estate companies create them through inside hiring and mentorship programs.

The theory behind this approach: It’s easier to find an eager but inexperienced new hire than to poach an experienced outside worker. Real estate brokerages understand that by pairing recruits with their veteran employees, they can cultivate expertise.

By the time these once-inexperienced recruits become eligible for higher-level positions, they’ll be more qualified for it than anyone else. In fact, research shows that outside hires take three years to perform as well as internal hires doing the same job. So, rather than having to find employees in a competitive marketplace, one of the HR lessons learned here is that investing in better training through mentors helps companies more organically build the best workforce.

5. Education: Internships

The hiring process in the education industry is unique. Teaching at a K-12 level requires years of experience through hands-on education programs and passing certification tests. Not all industries have such high requirements, but they can still learn from these pipelines.

College students pursuing education degrees finish their programs by student-teaching at a school. More often than not, the school systems where they student-teach will later hire them as full-time teachers when they graduate. Businesses and other industries can mimic this process by instituting intern programs that act as pipelines to employment.

Universities frequently involve faculty in interviewing and hiring their colleagues. Other industries can benefit from this same practice. In this longer-term hiring approach, employees already have intimate, hands-on knowledge about a position’s actual demands. So they can help spot ideal or unideal candidates and advise hiring decision-makers accordingly.

Businesses Can Learn a Lot from Other Industries

In a labor shortage, hiring companies must look further than their competitors for ideas about how to improve their hiring process. There are many HR lessons learned when taking inspiration from other industries like those mentioned above. These industries can provide practical, novel insights that businesses may not have gained otherwise.

These five industries are not perfect examples of ideal hiring processes, of course, but they all feature useful takeaways. Learning from each, then combining methods as necessary, can help create the optimal talent acquisition system for your company.

 

How Manufacturers Are Evolving to Recruit and Engage New Talent

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While smart companies of all types are investing more resources in worker engagement and development than ever, many manufacturers remain a step behind. In fact, Lisa Ryan, an employee engagement and retention expert with a background in the manufacturing and welding industries, says she still encounters manufacturers who are skeptical about the value of these worker-friendly concepts.

“In some places there is this mentality of, ‘The guys come to work, why should I thank them for doing their job?’ — but I’m seeing a slow change,” Ryan says. “It’s starting, but it’s not as fast as other industries. You can connect with people on a human level instead of just another employee ID number.”

This new approach across manufacturing is being driven by a dire labor shortage — created by the U.S. manufacturing renaissance, rapid technological advances and retiring baby boomers — that is projected to grow in the coming years. “If your company is stuck in an old, calcified way of doing business, you’re going to have a hard time finding and keeping younger workers,” Ryan says.

Failing to recruit and retain young talent could be fatal for manufacturers, who are already staring down a potential shortage of 2.4 million workers over the next decade, according to research from Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute. The same report found that a record 89 percent of executives agree there is already a talent shortage in the U.S. manufacturing sector, with firms struggling to find skilled labor to operate emerging technologies.

We asked a number of experts how the manufacturing sector is evolving to recruit and retain top talent. Here’s what they shared.

Changing Perceptions and Approaches

Khris Bhattan, president of RTG Solutions Group, which consults for the manufacturing sector, says one of the biggest drivers of recruitment and engagement strategy in the sector is the changing physical work environment, which in most cases has moved far beyond the stereotype of the gloomy factory floor.

“Manufacturers have become very aware of this negative stigma and have made significant investments in the manufacturing workspace to reverse it,” Bhattan says. “Investments in the workspace include not just the physical space but also the tools, equipment and safety protocols that are part of the workspace.”

Ryan agrees that a stigma of factory workplaces lingers with many job seekers, but she says companies can overcome it with recruiting pitches that focus more on the importance of technology in manufacturing. She says companies also need to drive home that automation and robotics are expected to create more jobs in the sector than they replace.

“On one hand, yes, it’s replacing workers,” she says. “Yet on the other hand, we’re looking for a different breed of talent and people that understand technology, like technology and want to use it in the manufacturing environment.”

Skills Gap Requires Creative Recruiting

Carlos Castelán, managing director and founder of The Navio Group, an HR/business consulting firm that works with companies to improve workplace engagement and productivity, says HR professionals in manufacturing organizations need to adjust to compete for the best and brightest.

“HR teams should think about different ways to meet the company’s goals, be it rethinking traditional employment and engaging on-demand talent solutions or adjusting pay on job offers to attract top talent in these areas,” he says. “More than ever HR plays a critical role in achieving a manufacturing company’s strategic objectives and long-term vision.”

Saint-Gobain, one of the world’s largest building materials companies and manufacturer of innovative material solutions, is taking innovative approaches to address the talent shortage, particularly when it comes to locations in rural areas. The company is looking beyond the geography of a job and touting positions in which people can design a career, “invent themselves and reshape the world,” says Valerie Gervais, the company’s senior vice president of human resources.

“We’re attracting talent in rural areas by rolling out pilot programs that take a holistic approach to people and families, because we know it’s not about making a living, it’s about making a life,” Gervais says. “In fact, we brought in an anthropologist to understand specific barriers that were impacting our ability to hire in certain areas. As an employer, we look at the whole ecosystem of the family.”

Manufacturing Engagement

In the book “The New Collar Workforce,” Sarah Boisvert writes about touring a family-owned and -operated jewelry company in Massachusetts that implemented lean manufacturing principles designed to encourage rapid iterations to reduce waste and improve efficiency.

She encountered a worker performing low-tech repetitive tasks who was nevertheless highly engaged in his job — because the company had empowered him to solve problems. “He was clearly proud to be valued by management and trusted to think, not just do something repetitively,” she writes.

Boisvert says lean manufacturing approaches can help tremendously with employee engagement if executives truly buy in and implement them with a focus on empowering people — which doesn’t always come easy in the sector.

“Manufacturing by definition is a conservative industry, and we’re conservative partially because change is expensive,” she says. “Anytime you have to change anything on the production line, it’s expensive both in terms of equipment and training.”

Ryan says part of the resistance to empowering, engaging and developing manufacturing employees is because most workers in the sector are between the ages of 45 and 65, rather than job-hopping millennials who want more feedback and opportunities for career development.

“There’s this mentality that ‘I’m going to be wasting my time with this person because they’re going to be leaving anyway,’ ” she says. “But if they just spent those couple of minutes, if they just created those connections and helped those people, they would probably be with the organization a lot longer.”

She says that to meet the complex needs of the next generation of workers, manufacturers will have to get creative in how they approach engagement and development. “A turkey at Christmas isn’t going to cut it,” Ryan says.

We want to hear from you. What are you seeing? How are recruiting and retention changing for you? What should manufacturing companies do to compete for top talent?

How Assessments Create Successful Manufacturing Hires

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Want to make the right manufacturing hires? A 2016 MRI survey on recruiting found that 80 percent of all hires are mistakes that cost companies time and money. In manufacturing, according to research by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute, nearly 3.5 million jobs may be needed over the next ten years. Some 2 million are expected to go unfilled due to the skills gap, however. This serious issue requires a serious shift in perspective: Discovering the right fit needs to be about more than skills. A pre-employment test can accurately evaluate aptitude and personality to assess a candidate’s real potential. The good news is that there are tests to do the heavy lifting and there’s no reason not to take advantage of these tools.

Aptitude: The Key Differentiator

A pre-employment assessment, that looks at a candidate’s potential, shifts our criteria to more effectively look at talent to address today’s realities. We’re staffing up in a super-tight job market that’s also experiencing a marked skills gap, so an open position can have a direct impact on production, as a 2014 study conducted by Accenture for The Manufacturing Institute uncovered. The talent shortage is costing American manufacturers an average of 11 percent in annual earnings— or $3,000 per existing employee.

The key is to recruit for aptitude as well as skill. A pre-employment test for mechanical aptitude, for instance, may convey that a potential hire will be able to ramp up fast and learn into the job. Recent research on hiring shows that aptitude is generally a far more effective indicator of on-the-job success: it’s twice as predictive as a job interview, three times as predictive as job experience, and four times as predictive as education level.

Pre-Hiring Tests Help Shape Careers, Not Just Fill Jobs

In the big picture, successful hiring is also about considering the candidate as talent, not just a pair of eyes and a pair of hands; and acknowledging that from their point of view, it’s not just about walking into a job and staying there. We know that in general, candidates prefer organizations that offer opportunities for growth.

Additionally, manufacturing may not be perceived as having the same kind of growth potential as other fields. Not to put too fine a point on this, but manufacturing was actually ranked last by Generation Y as a career choice in that Deloitte / Manufacturing Institute study. If the perception is that you won’t be hired if you don’t already know everything and have every skill, then the company is going to lose out on applicants from the beginning.

But companies can convey the potential for growth by demonstrating that they’re screening for it. Businesses that provide tests to measure aptitudes and potential for the future may be perceived as more competitive, and therefore more desirable to candidates. As a compelling piece by my colleagues at SHRM (the Society for Human Resource Management) pointed out, when companies make an effort to demonstrate that there’s a tangible skills ladder to climb, they may attract more applicants.

Metrics for Better Performance

Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute found that 80 percent of manufacturers have at least a moderate, if not a severe, shortage of qualified applicants for skilled and highly skilled production positions. The basic skills most lacking among applicants include:

  • Computer and technology skills — 70 percent lacked
  • Problem-solving skills — 69 percent lacked
  • Technical training — 67 percent lacked
  • Math skills — 60 percent lacked

So if you’re looking for new talent, screen for these as aptitudes — and then provide the training and growth that cultivates them into specific skills.

Companies can also establish benchmarks based on existing best-performing employees — a new but proven strategy that’s catching on. Take this example from Criteria Corp’s website: Criteria stands at the vanguard of pre-hire testing, enabling firms in the manufacturing sector — from small businesses to larger ones — to winnow out top talent efficiently. Criteria works with companies in a whole range of fields, to be sure. But here’s an example from manufacturing: an American installation and repair service company wanted to decrease turnover rates and improve the productivity of more than 3,000 service technicians. The solution: Set a standard, and go from there.

The company first administered the Wiesen Test of Mechanical Aptitude (WTMA) to one group of its techs to create a standard. What emerged was a set of scores associated with high performance that could be used as a baseline for pre-employment testing. The result with this kind of process is that everyone is happy. The candidates are happy to participate in a process that’s data-driven and transparent. Companies are satisfied because the process works. Hiring managers and recruiters are assessing candidates based on qualitative data rather than hunches, which drives a new kind of commitment we all want in our workplaces.

In terms of engagement and alignment, here’s how it works: The candidate experiences, firsthand, the company’s commitment to both making a fair hire and investing in a candidate’s learning and development. The company gets a candidate motivated to do the legwork to grow. The results: better hires, better performance, but also a better workplace. That’s better, in my book, than gambling on guesswork.

To read more from Criteria Corp about manufacturing and assessments, click here.

This post is sponsored by Criteria Corp.

Photo Credit: mycos2012 Flickr via Compfight cc