Building a Better Manufacturing Candidate Experience

With the existing manufacturing skills gap and no sign of industry demand slowing over the next decade, companies need to get creative when it comes to recruiting and hiring skilled manufacturing workers. One of the techniques for doing this is crafting a structured candidate experience.

We are in a candidate-driven hiring environment, one where a handful of employers are competing for a limited number of qualified workers. Candidate experience has never been so important.

The concept of candidate experience is simple: it’s how a prospective hire interacts with your company at every stage of the recruitment, hiring, and onboarding funnel. The goal is to ensure all candidates have a positive experience from start to finish — enough so that even those who are not initially hired for a role feel as though their experience was so positive they may apply for future positions or keep their application in your talent pool.

Crafting Your Candidate Experience

So how do you master the art of candidate experience? Combine the recruitment knowledge of your HR team with the cutting-edge technology solutions of today.

Sell Your Company

Candidate-driven environments demand companies look at the recruitment and hiring process as their personal sales pitch to candidates. Shifting from a mentality of “what can this candidate do for me” to “what unique opportunities and benefits can our company offer this candidate” is a good first step in adopting a candidate experience-first process.

One of the best ways to get your company’s unique selling points across is to have consistent branding, values, and company culture statements throughout the candidate experience. BirdDogHR’s Brand Builder can help, bolstering your existing brand, overhauling your sales message to candidates, and taking your company culture online. With Brand Builder, you will make sure candidates understand why you’re different from the very start.

Make It Easy

With so much competition, your company has to make it as easy as possible for candidates to apply. This means a couple of things:

• Reach candidates where they are: Many candidates, particularly younger ones, are being referred to job ads through social media. An estimated 86% of employees in the first 10 years of their career use these platforms to hunt for work. Brand Builder can help craft a consistent company message, but you also need to create job ads that are easily distributed over these platforms. BirdDogHR Talent Scout ensures top candidates are approached through the right distribution channels, including social media.
• Be mobile: Improving the candidate experience also means making it easy for them to interact with your company on every platform. 78% of Millennials are using smartphones to search for jobs. This is especially true for construction and manufacturing candidates — people working in these sectors aren’t always sitting behind a desk and their job search habits are reflective of this. The BirdDogHR Applicant Tracking Software will provide candidates the mobile experience and flexibility they need.
• Have a process in place: There is nothing more frustrating than applying for a job and having it take weeks — if not months — to hear back. Creating a positive candidate experience means creating a consistent and smooth funnel for candidates, one where they’re never left wondering what comes next. When it comes time to assess candidates, keep the process fair and streamlined using BirdDogHR’s Competency Connect. This tool ensures you’re hiring the right people, but also makes the process fair and transparent for candidates: standardizing competency tests, revealing job success metrics, and selecting candidates based on their past experiences, rather than hiring for cultural fit.

The three points above will maximize the ease through which candidates can apply to be part of your team, rather than that of a competitor.

Understand Your Candidate

To create a positive candidate experience, you need to know who your candidates are in the first place. The manufacturing candidates of today are not the blue-collared workers of the past, and companies need to recognize that they will be attracting everyone from apprenticeship candidates to university graduates, line workers to Internet of Things experts. BirdDogHR’s ATS provides the valuable candidate statistics you need so you can understand just who it is you’re communicating with and attracting.

Onboard Like a Champion

Candidate experience doesn’t stop after the recruitment and hiring process is through. Onboarding is the final step of the recruitment and hiring funnel, and an onboarding process that involves briefing about company culture, communication, and health and safety procedures is essential. Automate paperwork and get employees started on the right foot with employee onboarding software tools.

Candidate experience is everything for manufacturing companies today. Make sure you have the right talent management solution to backup you and your team — schedule a consultation with BirdDogHR today.