9 Tips for Employee Recruitment, Training and Retention

SendCutSend successfully recruits, hires, trains and retains new employees who don’t have traditional manufacturing backgrounds. CEO Jim Belosic says one key element is ensuring your shop provides a good environment where people actually want to work: clean, well-lit and temperature-controlled. Images provided by SendCutSend. 

One of SendCutSend CEO Jim Belosic’s LinkedIn posts went viral recently. It listed the previous experience of his company’s 12 most recent hires for manufacturing positions, which include a former donut shop employee, accounting assistant, elder caregiver, janitor, bartender, AI data analyst, call center rep, VA nurse, associate at Dollar Tree, hospitality associate, school custodian and graphic designer. “Relying on someone else (a school, the government) to create skilled labor for you means you're gonna be waiting a while. Just do it yourself…The labor supply is endless if you are willing to put in the effort,” the post continued. So how does a successful manufacturer approach recruiting, on-the-job training and retention? When I recently spoke with him, Belosic shared some of his company’s strategies.

SendCutSend’s in-house software automatically generates work instructions that walk employees through the process of producing each part. This eases training requirements and enables employees to become productive quickly. 

1. Hire for traits, not experience. Belosic says the best new hires don’t necessarily have a background in manufacturing, but are curious, inquisitive, motivated to earn money and want opportunities for advancement. “If you can identify those types of people, then the training is really easy because they want to see how things work,” he adds.
2. Make your shop somewhere people are proud to work. When recruiting new people into the manufacturing industry, “What you're selling to people is the next 5, 10, 20 years of their life,” Belosic points out. “Where do they want to spend it?” It starts with a pleasant physical environment: “Good lighting, it shouldn't be smoky, it should be air conditioned, it should be heated, it should be nice and clean.” Employees feel proud to show their families where they work. “It's also what I want,” he continues. “I am out on the floor all the time. Oftentimes I'll just grab a laptop and put it on a brick of steel and work out there. I don't want to be hot. I don't want it to be too loud. I'm a princess. I want it to be really nice, and I want it nice for all my guys.”
3. Top employees are worth top dollar. SendCutSend wants the best employees it can find and pays above market rate to recruit and retain them. “If you pay a guy $30 an hour, he'll easily do the work of two guys at $15,” Belosic says. “If you're making 15 bucks an hour, you don't really care. What you're spending your time on is looking for your next job that's going to pay you more.”
4. Use your team as recruiters. Once a shop has created a good environment and a solid team, employees will work to protect that. SendCutSend uses its employees’ networks to find candidates to hire, and, just as importantly, candidates to avoid. “People will be like, ‘I have three roommates. I'm going to recommend one of them to work here, but if the other two apply, do not hire them,’” Belosic says. “There's a self-preservation thing that's happening internally where people are like, ‘We’ve got a good thing going here and I don't want to screw it up with my lazy roommate or my brother-in-law who's just going to try and steal from the company.’”
5. Software eases the burden of training. SendCutSend runs on a software system built in house that handles, among other things, quoting, MES, ERP, CRM and scheduling. It also automatically generates work instructions for every part, which employees can access via a terminal at every workstation. Employees scan a barcode for each job, and the software tells them where to go and which tooling to use, sends the program and tooling to the control and walks them through each step. “It allows people to get started very, very quickly,” Belosic says.
6. Build clear advancement ladders and communicate them. A clear path to promotion, including different roles and the skills needed to move into them, is one of the best ways to retain good employees, Belosic says. “It took us years to actually formulate this out,” he explains, “but it ends up paying off so well because someone can just look at that board and be like, ‘I want to get there and here's all the steps that I need to take.’”
7. Set high expectations. According to Belosic, if an employee gets a “meets expectations” during a review, “that's pretty incredible because our expectations are very, very high.” Creating a culture of high performance enables team members to easily identify who isn’t a good fit. “The team will be like, ‘This guy is slowing us all down, or he's not contributing,’” he says. “And we'll realize it's not a good fit, and we'll reorg or separate.”
8. A business is a team, not a family. To Belosic, treating employees like family leads to protection of underperformers. And if one employee isn’t performing, it can bring down morale and slow high performers. He treats recruitment as “a draft, and we're going to try and get the best people possible.”
9. Employee departures are feedback, not betrayal. Shop owners who invest resources into training new hires are often afraid those employees will eventually leave for a different job. But Belosic has a different mindset. “I want to take people off the street and teach them a skill that's going to make their personal lives better. If they can buy a house or have kids because of SendCutSend, I'm incredibly proud of that legacy,” he says. “If they can take that knowledge and apply it somewhere else, that's cool. At the end of the day, I will always be able to attract enough employees to serve my customers. And if my employees have the opportunity to go have an even better life outside of our walls, I'm pretty damn proud of that.” That said, SendCutSend works to ensure its employees can have fulfilling lives and careers without leaving. “We recognize talent,” he continues. “If an employee is doing so damn good that they're like, ‘I think I can command more money somewhere else, or I'm going to go start out on my own thing,’ we ask how we can give them that opportunity within our walls. It's not the cheapest way to run a business, but it's the best. It's how you get consistency and long-term loyalty. It's how you get people calling stuff out and making improvements instead of just letting it slide out the door.”

Belosic says much of the company’s recruiting is through referrals. Employees provide feedback on who the company should hire, and, just as importantly, who the company shouldn’t hire.