Be Prepared: Have a strong hiring strategy coming out of COVID

Be prepared.  A scouts motto but it certainly can be applied to today’s job market.  If you haven’t noticed, there has been an increase in opportunities out there in the engineering & manufacturing sectors but it’s not going to slow down anytime soon.  So if you need or are thinking about bringing in top talent, the time is now!   Back in March 2020, the job market was nuts.  It was simple.  There was a 12-18 month lead up to that point where it was becoming harder and harder to find good people.  Hard to find top talent.  COVID has just hidden this demand.  First off, since around September 2020, companies had their COVID policies in place and were becoming more familiar with the new normal and hiring started back up.  As you can imagine, there was not a lot of hiring from March to June-July of 2020.  The increase in roles from last September to now has been a steady increase with a slight drop during the lockdown at the start of 2021.  Here are a couple of the other signs of why you need to jump on hiring now:   Retirements.  Who was going to retire during the pandemic?  A lot of upcoming retirements were pushed off if they had the choice.  With all the uncertainty, why not take a paycheck to, in some cases, work from home.  In other cases, it was still better to push off retiring to get the stability of a paycheck and retiring once the pandemic was over.  So, over the next 6-12 months, I bet you we will see an uptick...

The Importance of Strong Leadership

The importance of strong leadership is an obvious part of growing a good business.  This article that I read, “Why a Bad Boss is Bad for Employer Brank”, is a great eye opener for a lot of companies out there.  It discusses the some points on Talent Attraction/Retention, Brand Reputation, Morale, Culture & Management by Fear. As a recruiter in the engineering & manufacturing space, I come across these topics on a daily basis and have even experienced some myself within my career.  There are certainly companies that I can list that I get told by candidates that they do not want to work for.  This is even before I’ve told them about any roles!!!  You definitely do not want to be that type of business.  What are you doing in your current role to prevent this from happening?  It may be worth asking your recruiter what feedback has been.  I know I am speaking with people every day about the manufacturing industry and have a good idea – I imagine others do as well.  All of this has an impact on each of the points listed above.  Not being able to attract the right people leads to bad hires which in turn causes turnover, costs money and creates a bad morale & culture in a business.  We all know that going through a culture change is not easy. What are you doing today to ensure your management team are creating the reputation and culture you want?  I’d like to hear ideas and thoughts of this....