Bridging the Blue-Collar Skills Shortage

According to Simba Jonga, founder of industrial recruiting platform Laborup, the challenge of the skilled labor shortage isn’t that there aren’t enough skilled tradespeople, it’s that these workers are difficult to find.

The skilled labor shortage isn’t a new issue in the manufacturing industry by any means, but recent investment and interest in domestic manufacturing throws it into sharper relief. Investing in education and training programs will pay off eventually, but many manufacturers need a faster solution.

Simba Jonga is the founder of Laborup, a recruiting platform that’s designed specifically for the skilled trades. “What I've seen is a lot of these workers are actually out there,” he says, “but they're kind of hard to find because they're not accessible in the traditional places that we look for work.” He says a typical example of this is a welder who’s working as a cashier at Walmart. “That's a misallocation of talent,” he notes. “They probably got that job because they couldn't get a welding job, but they needed to put food on their table.”

Featured Content

Metalworking Fluid Tackles the Challenges of Titanium Machining READ MORE

WEBINAR: From Machine Data to Guided Action: How Modern Shops Are Closing the Execution Gap READ MORE

35.BI-MU: Plenty of New Features for an Edition Rich in Thematic Insights READ MORE

Jonga says there could be millions of people like this hypothetical welder. “We have to find them, and we have to figure out what they're good at, interview them,” he continues, “and then we have to bring that information online and make it as easy as possible to find them.”

Laborup is designed to help manufacturers find skilled workers, but it can also help workers as well by making the job market more competitive. Image provided by Laborup.

A Resume for Blue-Collar Workers

A number of platforms for recruiting and hiring online already exist, but Jonga points out they’re not set up for the blue-collar workforce. For example, he says LinkedIn has become “professional Facebook” focusing on a feed of content from connections and other creators, with a personal profile that’s a secondary element. Unlike knowledge workers, many people who work in the trades aren’t tied to a computer for most of their day.

“They don't have time to use LinkedIn,” Jonga says. Furthermore, “LinkedIn is the one social media that people clock in and clock out of,” he adds. “And what I mean by that is most people use LinkedIn during work hours. They use it to procrastinate from actual work.” So, if someone doesn’t use LinkedIn at work, they’re less likely to use it at all.  

Trade schools, especially in the past, also may not have emphasized job searching skills the way colleges do for their graduates. “Most of the people that are on LinkedIn went through a four-year college experience. They were taught to make a LinkedIn profile, to make a resume,” Jonga notes. “They were taught the importance of all those things.” He says he has heard from many blue-collar workers who have never had to make a resume.

Jonga wanted Laborup to make the process of creating a profile or resume easy for these workers. The platform uses a conversational, voice-based AI chatbot to “screen” users and create a profile for them. “We don't ask you to make a profile and make a resume and all these things,” Jonga says. “You just get on a call that walks you through the process.”

The platform’s decision to use voice instead of text to gather information is intentional. “Most blue-collar folks do business on the phone,” Jonga notes. “Especially in some of the more remote places, they sometimes don't have access to computers, but they might be the most qualified toolmaker there is in town.” Laborup is designed to close this gap using more accessible technology.

The resulting profile is more than a work history or resume — it’s designed to communicate that information “in a way that's more native to the work,” Jonga says. “This is the information that's useful for the hiring manager.” For machinists, this includes the types of machine tools a person has worked with, down to the brands and models; what standards they’re familiar with, such as AS9100 and ISO; whether they have experience in production or job shops; what roles they’ve held on the shop floor; and what tolerances they can hold. “It's leaning more into the skills that someone has and then verifying them through either credentialing or where they've worked,” he explains.

Laborup uses an accessible, conversational AI chatbot to build a profile for users. The resulting profile communicates users’ work histories and skills in a way that’s more natural for manufacturing work. Image provided by Laborup. 

Helping Employers and Employees

Jonga notes that not only does the platform help manufacturers hire new employees and close the skills gap, but it also helps employees by creating more competition between employers for workers. “You create more liquidity in the labor market, which actually draws more people and actually raises wages,” he explains.

Laborup is already having success in finding new jobs for machinists. Jonga describes one user, a toolmaker with 20 years of experience who was applying for jobs on traditional job search sites without a resume and not getting responses. Jonga says the screening process produced one of the richest profiles he’s ever seen, which helped the user secure five job offers within a week.

From Manufacturing to Maintenance

Laborup’s challenge now is to grow its user base. It gets in front of workers early in their careers by partnering with technical schools, but more experienced workers are harder to reach. This means leaving flyers in community spaces, looking to social media sites like Instagram and Reddit that serve as more of an “interest graph” than a career graph, and incentivizing referrals. “The thing we like to say internally is that one good machinist knows five other good machinists,” Jonga says. “Share to those five and then get every single one of those five to share with their five.”

The platform is currently expanding in the Southeast and Midwest. “We’re really targeting places where these needs are deep,” Jonga says. “We now reach hundreds of thousands of workers across machining, welding, maintenance, quality inspection, all kinds of different technicians and all the different variants that exist out there.”

For now, Jonga says the company is focusing on machining and wants “to get really good in in one lane” before expanding to other skilled trades. He notes maintenance as an area of particular interest, “especially mechatronics in the world that we're going into with more automation and robotics.”