As attracting talent is top of mind for manufacturing companies, many are reviewing their processes and looking at ways to attract the best and the brightest.
Ingersoll Rand, a global manufacturing and engineering company, uses the principles of Lean transformation to recruit, onboard, retain and promote talent across the organization in eight easy steps.
Marc Cochran, Talent Acquisition Manager at Ingersoll Rand will speak on the topic at the 2018 IndustryWeek Manufacturing & Technology Conference and Expo. He recently took some time to answer a few questions about talent acquisition in advance of his presentation. Here are his comments:
IW: Is there a trend happening in which companies are in fact using tenants of lean to apply to talent acquisition?
Cochran: In many ways, companies are reliant on how skilled and experienced their recruiters are to deliver successful hires. So naturally this creates a lot of variation, and outcomes are not consistent or sustainable if a recruiter changes roles or leaves the company. Ultimately they have to start back at square one, which creates a disruption to the business. Some companies, like ours, are beginning to use lean to develop a culture of continuous improvement and actually engaging people doing the work to develop standards and begin improvement on those standards.
IW: What is the first step a company needs to take to change its culture?
Cochran: Define your customer and be able to see the process. Talent acquisition is like many functional or transactional office environments where it’s not always easy to “see” the work being done. Whether that’s through a visual management process or value stream analysis event, once you can see the work and understand how your customer assigns value, you can begin to see opportunities to start improving. It’s also powerful for all the stakeholders to see where the waste is, and most of the time we’re the ones that create the waste.
IW: How have the rules of talent acquisition changed in the past few years?
Cochran: Talent acquisition has accelerated its evolution like many industries by the rapid pace of new technologies. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and process automation are areas that many companies are starting to experiment with. Access to talent has become easier with tools like Linked In, so we are working to take a more design approach to the overall candidate experience. At the end of the day, we want the recruiter, hiring manager, and candidate having the most value-added interaction every time.
