The essential guide to recruitment marketing in the manufacturing industry

The essential guide to recruitment marketing in the manufacturing industry

As the manufacturing industry grows and evolves, it faces a host of challenges— particularly when it comes to hiring talent. The digital transformation manufacturing is undergoing (“Industry 4.0”) means companies need to hire for even more specialized, in-demand skills—and they’re increasingly competing with sectors like retail, healthcare, and technology to do so.

Recruiting teams also struggle with talent’s negative perception of the industry: while the pandemic led to an awareness of the significance of manufacturing (its employees were deemed “essential workers”), recent surveys suggest that talent simply isn’t aware of the industry’s technological advancements—let alone the considerable cultures, salaries, and benefits that manufacturing companies offer.

Add to this outdated perception of the industry (manufacturing roles are monotonous and tedious as well as physically and environmentally harmful, their organizations are homogenous, etc.) the problem of filling roles in location-specific—and sometimes rural—factories that require a daily commute or a relocation. Job openings in the industry are hovering near all-time highs at 800,000, and 74% of manufacturing executives say that finding the right talent is a top-5 challenge.

Indeed, the difficulty of attracting more workers to the sector has been one of the top issues in the National Association of Manufacturers Outlook Survey every quarter for the last ten years—and NAM anticipates that the U.S. alone will have 2.1 unfilled manufacturing jobs by 2030.