All right, the 10 Minute Talent Rant is live. I’m James Hornick, joined by Jeff Smith and we are on the clock. The 10 Minute Talent Rant is our ongoing series where we break down things that are broken in the talent acquisition and hiring space. Maybe even pitch a solution or two. Before we dig in, all of our content can be found at talentinsights.hirewell.com.
We don’t want to get too many- we might give our competition a few pointers today, which- yeah. Hate doing it. Hate doing it. Anyways, this week’s episode, episode 104, ‘Why aren’t recruiting firms innovating in the industrial sector?’ That’s a mouthful. It’s a good question, though. We had a hard time with this time.
We had a hard time with the title, but I think- I think it fits. It beat out some other ones. I’d like to start with a good Zoolander reference. Manufacturing, so hot right now. If you’d touch it, you’d burn. Yeah. We wanted to really talk about the saturation of recruitment services. Why there’s so many firms focused in some industries like tech sector.
While other industries are just dying for help and no one really kind of works with them. We’re going to talk about manufacturing and industrial specifically, but this phenomenon isn’t even specific to that. Like long before the pandemic, when Hirewell, when we were a, we were just a Chicago based firm, like back in the day.
We first started working more broadly across the country in sales. And we started doing sales recruiting just because you have to be able to build sales teams to do it in various cities. And then we kind of notice as we’re doing that, we started recruiting for things in other areas we played in, HR, tech, marketing in small cities specifically, just because we noticed they were very underserved by recruitment firms.
We had less competition because there weren’t a lot of good firms in these types of cities. Fast forward to now making this more of a present conversation, last year we kicked off like 21 new RPO engagements. Eight of them came within industrial. So that’s manufacturing, engineering, skilled trade, supply chain, those types of things.
Yeah. It’s just, it’s so intense right now. In the best way. More and more manufacturing based companies are a.) committing to growth and we’re just seeing less competition overall by happenstance because of that. As we film, we’ve got this massive project that’s just about to cross the finish line.
We’re super excited about it. And just last week we signed eight to 10 roles with another manufacturing firm, that’s looking for a lot of the same office dorks that tech companies are. So let’s first talk about what’s driving it and then why- what’s driving the growth in that sector, but also why there’s- we’re not seeing as much competition there.
Yeah. So number one, industry 4. 0. I missed 3. 0. I didn’t even know that. Run 4.0. 3.7.2 beta. Yeah. You’ve got smart factories, AI integration, robotics, 3D printing, you know, the whole kit and caboodle. It’s not new. There’s obviously ongoing, you know, efficiencies and innovation and manufacturing, but it’s intensified with this AI boom.
So the short of it is the nerds have their filthy little myths on, uh, on all the manufacturing innovation. I’m kidding. It’s great. We’re seeing more demand because of that innovation. And it’s resulted in, you know, this interesting phenomenon. It’s not less human jobs. It’s actually quite the opposite from what we can tell.
Machine operators are becoming highly trained, sophisticated professionals that are driving higher production. And they’re using these new assets to build more things. It’s created a new class of worker that’s getting paid higher wages and is infinitely more marketable out on the open market. It’s just the net net is it’s been really fun to watch and like the kid in me loves the idea of robots building unthinkable things.
Yeah. The 2nd thing is government incentives. Like, this has been a big push by the last administration and everyone who’s paying attention. I think it’s a big push in the next administration. I had to actually look these ups so I knew what they were that is the (IIJA) infrastructure investment and jobs act and then the chips act, which is a little bit easier.
That’s creating helpful incentives to produce semiconductors. So it’s green energy or renewable energy and semiconductor growth are both huge. Now, when people think of green energy, like they always think of like EVs and solar and wind and stuff like that, but this is like public transit. This is grid modernization.
This is water systems. This thing is, these things are all huge. As for semiconductors, I mean, you kind of have to be living under a rock to miss what’s been happening in that space with NVIDIA and all these chip companies and what’s driving AI and all that kind of stuff. Like, I mean, NVIDIA outperformed Bitcoin last year.
So it’s just like the amount of semiconductor growth we’re seeing is unreal. This new thing that I was just talking about, this thing that’s at the finish line, semiconductors. Yep. Not coincidental. Number 2, there’s this big effort to reshore and bring manufacturing back to the US. Again, politics aside, that’s been a big talking point.
We’re bringing manufacturing back to the United States. It remains to be seen how much of it will actually happen, but it’s clear the push is there. Yeah, some companies are already doing it, which has resulted in some of this recruiting boom. Here’s what we love about this in the, you know, oh, so self serving way.
So few recruiting firms focus on this exact stuff. Baffling. Yeah. We have a team that’s dedicated to it and we see way less competition versus to your point, areas like technology and sales recruiting stuff where the, like the market is completely saturated. Again, it’s been this area that’s been completely underserved and companies are literally dying for help in it.
Let’s get to answering the question we kind of led this whole thing off of it. So why is there so little competition? So we do have a handful of competitors. The key is they have not changed at least in my career, which is 20 plus years. I didn’t even know, I didn’t even realize we like, I didn’t even really, I’ve heard of these places.
I didn’t know what they did or we’ve never really run into them in any of the stuff we work on. So this was actually news to me. I’m probably part of the problem. So, the net net is the manufacturing and industrial sector is doing really cool shit, but the recruiting engine that services that growth is still, I mean, it’s as stale as a 3 day old bagel.
That’s the best euphemism we can use. Solutions have not changed. And they really do- like the whole ecosystem detracts new players from entering the game. So, especially with bigger organizations. So you think these 10K plus like employee populations, like they all buy the same solution from one of the five big players, more or less.
We stopped feeling out RFIs a long time ago because it, it always amounted to this race to the bottom, from a margin perspective. And the worst part of it all, is all of the current big players take margin, listen to that, directly from the candidate. Not from a company or from the provider. The big loser is the candidate.
It’s all markup driven and the inevitable losers are the actual heroes that build all of our shit. So not us. We looked at it from let’s solve the problem and make this an incredible candidate experience play. So we deliver solutions at scale and it’s centered all around that candidate experience with zero margin rips off the candidate pay.
The goal is to humanize the recruiting process for our production workers, and, you know, that has to be priority number one over the next decade. Companies that align with this or partner with us, if you so choose, are going to win. Case closed. Couple this with the market center compensation being, you know, online versus taking the seven to ten percent rip off of, you know, that old system, and you’ve got a winning recipe.
Yeah. The 2nd thing. So people in that space are just dinosaurs. The 2nd thing is that most agencies, like if you work in our circles, if you compete against us with other stuff, or you’re familiar with us as a tech recruiting agency or marketing or sales, but the types of recruiters who fit a lot of our more traditional office dork areas, like, they have tunnel vision.
I didn’t really know much about the manufacturing industrial space until 2 or 3 years ago when we started getting into it. Recruiting firms are sheep. Like, we’re not the most adventurous bunch of people. Like, it’s really been really easy for any recruiter in the past 10 to 15 years to get in the
tech or SaaS within tech sales recruiting bubble. You know, so many companies hiring for the exact same thing. You find one candidate, you can send them out to 20 different clients. You’re going to make a placement out of it. All the jobs were remote. So it was super easy from that perspective. Tech companies are super sexy.
So it’s easy, an easy story to tell. You know, they’ve got to maybe some cool ideas that sound just so unique and interesting. And candidates always fawn over equity. And it’s been the same play over and over again. And it’s just easy to think like that is the world that you live in as a recruiter and that’s all that’s out there.
Yeah. We romanticized white collar work. Yeah. It’s pretty sad. I mean, it was easy for recruiters to put their blinders on and think that that’s all there was to this job, like hire office dorks. Meanwhile, in the real world, there’s companies out outside of this echo chamber, the LinkedIn echo chamber, let’s be real, that need to hire skill sets that most recruiters haven’t heard of. And they are, again, we said they’re dying for the help.
All of these players, many of these places are recession proof. They’ve been around a lot longer than your series A through pre IPO unicorn or, you know, fairy dust or whatever we’re talking about. And they can make money in any market. They make things. And most importantly, they need help because as we’ve referenced, they are completely underserved.
Yeah. I remember the first time that I realized that there was another world. I was at a pharmaceutical client and they had this big like recruitment day. And I was there and they had probably had people from all these different firms. It’s a huge organization. And I was talking to people at the next table over and they recruited scientists.
I’m there, I’m talking about like the marketers and people they need to hire and stuff like that, and the go to market thing. I’m like, we mean scientists, like, they’re like, you know, the people actually make the drugs that this company makes. I’m like, I’ve never thought of that as like- Right, right, right, right.
I just thought that just kind of happened, anyways. Yeah. And so that’s, it’s really easy to get kind of, how about blinders on me and I was in the same boat for a long time. Anyways, takeaways. Look, if you’re in the manufacturing, engineering, industrial sector, and you need help hiring, scaling, let us know. We’ve got this team, we’ve got a team of experts, Shannon DiBenedetto is our practice lead. Hit her up, hit James or I up. We focus on these skill sets and we can build a solution for you. And not that I like to encourage or help our competitors improve, but if you’re a struggling recruiter out there, there’s a whole world out there that needs your services.
And this is the last time I help you guys. Anyways. It’s a good pivot for those of you who are struggling. We are short on clock. That’s a wrap for this week. Thanks again for tuning into the 10 Minute Talent Rant part of the Talent Insights series, which is always available for replay on talentinsights.hirewell.com, as well as YouTube, Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon. Jeff, thanks again as always. Everyone out there, we will see you soon.
