It’s hard to find good help these days — if you’ve said that old adage to yourself recently, know you’re not alone. For years, the push has been for high school students to consider high-tech jobs and away from the skilled trades, leaving a shortage of trained job candidates.
It’s still possible to find good workers who are up-to-date with their skills! Here are three ways to find the right skilled trades workers for your business.
Be specific about what you need.
If your company is looking for someone who can weld and fix machines, say so. If you’re looking for a woodworker or electrician, say it. If you know exactly what you need, you’ll be better able to write a job description that can spell out the skills that are needed to help your company succeed, and you’ll attract candidates with precisely the abilities you want to have to join your team. If possible, provide a description of what the person in this role would be required to complete in a given day or week, so candidates can get a sense of whether they have the right skills to apply.
Check certifications.
With those skills in mind, review a candidate’s application or resume to make sure they have current and applicable certifications to back up their abilities. If they’ve listed jobs where they’ve worked previously, or schools through which they earned certifications, call and double check. This is essentially the same process as checking someone’s references before making an offer; you want to make sure you’re interviewing people who can do what they say they can and will be able to contribute to the position right away.
Be creative in your recruiting.
It’s not enough to just post open positions online, or just try to recruit new employees through your current team, or to just work with trade schools and unions. To attract the best-skilled trade candidates, you have to do all of that and more. And you need to explain why they should pick your company as their employer instead of other companies looking for those same skills. What can you offer that your competition can’t? Do you have a training program to help keep their skills sharp? Do you offer flexible hours that can help promote a better work-life balance? Are you trying to recruit women as much as men? Good candidates are out there, and you just need to put your 2022 thinking cap on and try your best to make the position as enticing as possible in as many locations as you can.
Ready to add to your skilled trades team? Sterling Personnel is ready to help.
It’s tough to be a hiring manager these days, when there are more positions open than applicants to fill them and the power is in the hand of the job candidate. But make extra efforts to find those workers and entice them to join your team and you just might find yourself with too many good options.
If you need a little help getting started, or need people in the short-term for a big project, contact Sterling Personnel. We have excellent, skilled candidates looking for great jobs and they’re ready to start right away. Call Sterling Personnel today and let’s help fill your team.
