Opening a new plant? Here’s how to fill those positions
Companies that frequently open new plants know the drill and use multiple strategies to fill the numerous new positions for a smooth startup. Here’s how they do it and discover how Beneficial Talent Source can help you efficiently fill critical positions.
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Recruiting Methods for Staffing a New Plant
Internal Transfers and Promotions
Skilled Staff Transfers: Companies often transfer some skilled workers from existing facilities to the new plant, especially to fill roles that require specific expertise or experience. Some employees are happy to move, but incentives are commonly used to fill positions.
Internal Training Programs: Upskilling and cross-training transferred employees are critical to ensuring a successful new site launch. Training programs come with a cost, but this is almost always outweighed by strong returns on investment as seasoned employees will be productive at the new site.
Recruitment Drives
Online Job Portals: Posting on websites like Indeed, Glassdoor, or specialized industry portals is common. It’s important to have in-house HR personnel to vet that talent and engage them quickly.
Local Hiring Events: Companies often have a presence at metro-area job fairs or even hold their own job fairs ahead of the plant opening to attract new talent. Turnout is enhanced by getting the word out via chambers of commerce, press release, and colleges.
Companies also engage recruiting firms to bring curated talent to the job fair and take advantage of the logistics that have been set up for interviewing, touring, and meeting the candidates via these events. The gives job fairs great synergy with using a recruiting agency.
Partnerships with Educational Institutions: Collaboration with technical schools and colleges, if established well ahead of an anticipated plant opening, can provide qualified candidates. Outside of employee referrals, this type of engagement is a great way to bring skilled talent to your company on a recurring cyclical basis. Though not always best for filling many roles in a short period.
Employee Referrals
Incentive Programs: Many companies offer bonuses to current employees for referring successful new hires, with an extra push for new plant openings. Money will always be the best motivator for these programs but younger generations are also heavily motivated by experiences and opportunities for time off.
Social Media and Advertising
Awareness Campaigns: Creating a buzz around the new plant, and any tax incentives for job creation, through social media can attract potential employees.
Targeted Advertising: Online ads targeting relevant skill sets can be effective in reaching a wide audience.
Importance of Training Programs
On-the-Job Training: New hires may undergo a period of training and orientation to understand the specific requirements of their role. For specialized roles, companies may offer training programs to upskill workers.
Using a Recruiting Agency
Recruiting Agencies for Skilled Trades and Engineering: Companies use recruitment agencies that specialize in their industry, such as manufacturing or engineering, to fill the large number and variety of roles. Recruiting agencies provide a dive into the talent pools that save considerable effort and bring vetted candidates.
On-site Personnel Management: Recruiting agencies can be used for more than just bringing qualified candidates but also for complete on-site personnel management.
Unique Challenges of Staffing a New Plant
Staffing the new plant brings challenges that aren’t present when hiring to replace attrition or to grow the company as a whole.
A new plant requires hiring many people in a short time, with accuracy to reduce backfill and training time.
A new plant requires maintaining and instilling the company culture, and keeping compliance with a quick ramp up of paperwork, logistics, payroll, and benefits.
A new plant requires people with specialized skills who will work well with each other and with the particulars of your modern new plant.
A new plant is usually expected to produce state-of-the-art results for the company and/or customers – too much on-the-job training or replacing unsuitable hires throws a wrench into things.
A new plant often brings scrutiny of its success by public and government entities.
Opening a new plant is a significant investment in both dollar capital and reputation capital. Given these factors, what can you do to tilt the odds in your favor with a dependable source of high-quality hires?
Include a Recruiting Agency
All these recurring methods have their place and companies usually use multiple channels. Yet it’s good to have a core, dependable source of vetted talent. Out-sourcing to a recruiting agency is that source.
Compared to Internal Transfers and Promotions
A Fresh Perspective: Hiring new employees through agencies can bring fresh ideas and perspectives into the company. Agencies tap into the passive market and bring highly desirable talent to the table that otherwise never would know you were hiring.
This passive market represents the talent pool that is performing and excelling at their jobs and bring some of the most valuable perspectives to your teams. They know what works from their past employer, most likely a competitor, and now can bring you that valuable detail.
Reduced Organizational Disruption: Internal transfers can cause gaps in the existing facilities that need to be filled, which can be avoided by hiring new personnel through an agency.
Even then you should no more than 10% of your workforce to make the move without costly incentives to increase the number willing to transfer. These incentives usually require an increase in pay, PTO, shift upgrades and relocation assistance.
Compared to Recruitment Drives
Efficiency: Recruiting agencies can quickly provide a list of vetted candidates, saving the company the time and resources required for organizing large recruitment events. Your team is your most valuable asset, and their most valuable asset is time. When you save them time and give them solutions like a vetted list and trusted recruiting partner you allow them to perform their job at a higher level ensuring their satisfaction and desire to grow the company.
Expertise: Agencies specialize in recruitment and can thus more effectively evaluate the fit of a candidate for a specific role. This is typically less important for management or financial positions but critical for operations, with many different specialized skills.
Compared to Online Job Portals
Quality Over Quantity: Job portals can generate an enormous volume of applicants with just a few high-quality candidates. Agencies curate a list of qualified individuals.
Passive Candidates: Recruiting agencies often have access to candidates who are not actively searching on job portals but may be a good fit.
In today’s market with low unemployment and multiple opportunities for work there’s a narrow window of time to capture interest and engage with candidates where it will lead to a smooth transition to hire.
Compared to Partnerships with Educational Institutions
Experience: Agencies can provide candidates with varied levels of experience, unlike fresh graduates from educational institutions.
Immediate Availability: Students are available for co-ops or upon graduation, whereas agencies can source candidates year-round.
Compared to Employee Referrals
More at Once: Employee referrals are low effort and can build camaraderie, a great practice, yet they usually result in a drip of candidates, not coming close to staffing a new plant.
Objective Evaluation: Agencies offer a neutral, third-party evaluation of candidates, whereas employee referrals can be influenced by personal relationships.
Broader Reach: Referrals are limited to the networks of existing employees, whereas agencies can tap into a larger pool of potential candidates.
Compared to Social Media and Advertising
Targeted Sourcing: Agencies can offer a more targeted recruitment process compared to the broad reach of social media and advertising.
Confidentiality: For roles that require discretion during the hiring process, using a third-party recruiting agency is the ticket.
Compared to the Need for Training New Hires
Reduced Onboarding Time: Agencies can provide candidates who are already trained and experienced, reducing the need for extensive onboarding programs.
Lower Training Costs: By hiring candidates with the required skills, companies can save on the costs associated with training new hires.
Beneficial Talent Source Can Help
“Noah and his team at Beneficial Talent Source have provided us with over six hundred production and skilled workers ranging from general labor to office professionals, on a contract to hire and direct placement basis. Their work ethic, creativity and knowledge of the industry has led to that success.”
Adding Beneficial Talent Source to your existing in-house hiring team offers numerous advantages. Companies weighing these benefits against their needs, budget constraints, and organizational capabilities frequently choose to add us to their in-house hiring process. We bill on contingency, so there’s no risk or up-front cost for our traditional solutions and our retained solutions for the more complex projects will have all costing given upfront after a discovery call.
We’ve developed a solution that guarantees a fulltime staff managed by our clients in time and a partnership that gets them there quickly with a program we manage. Through utilizing onsite and temp staffing services you can run a mix of full-time, temp to hire, and temp employees to manage your staff daily and guarantee stability and consistent output. Our team is great at deploying this strategy and works closely with our clients to make sure they have a turnkey program that delivers for them for years to come.
“I’ve worked with Beneficial Talent Source to staff our most challenging roles for over six years. We simply couldn’t do it without the qualified candidate pool they bring to the table.”
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