Things have changed dramatically over the last couple of years - not just from a recruitment perspective, but in a variety of industries and sectors.
The impact of Covid-19, Brexit, inflation, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and numerous other factors have impacted the manufacturing industry, and our specialist recruiters have noticed this in particular.
Thankfully, things are looking up for the sector, and businesses are recruiting now more than ever.
Here, we talk to Chris Jones about how the manufacturing industry has changed in our post-pandemic world, and what he predicts is going to happen in the sector during 2023.
Hi Chris! Tell us about yourself and your role at Scantec.
Hello! I’m Chris Jones, I am a Principal Consultant here at Scantec on the engineering team. I have worked here for almost five years now - I started as a Senior Consultant, and was promoted to Principal.
What kinds of manufacturing clients do you have?
I have a really broad range of clients, the majority of which are large, multi-site based facilities. For example, some of my current clients manufacture flexible as well as rigid packaging for the chemical and industrial markets, doors for the housing market as well as machine tools. All of my clients tend to be multi-line, fast-paced environments.
How would you say things have changed in the industry because of the pandemic?
Prior to the pandemic, things were pretty positive from a recruitment perspective. It was all running smoothly and there were no major hiccups in my market. However, things became extremely challenging for a lot of our manufacturing clients during Covid as in many cases their employees weren't classed as essential key workers during the first lockdown which caused obvious uncertainty and knock-on effects here.
Thankfully though, when things improved in 2021, the floodgates opened and recruitment has changed dramatically - most Scantec’s recruiters have had their best ever years in 2022! During the last quarter of this year, there have been a few economic challenges such as the budget, inflation and so on. As a result, some clients started to slow down a bit with their spend.
There’s been a huge push on salaries in the sector. A lot of my clients have been asking me about salaries and benchmarking, because they know it’s a candidate-short market and they need to remain competitive in order to hire the people they need. Most of the roles I recruit for have seen around a 25% rise in salary over the last three to four years, which is incredible.
What about benefits, have they changed?
In manufacturing, a lot of what candidates want comes down to shift based work - most candidates don’t tend to opt for the day shift roles, simply because of the lack of flexibility and they tend to get paid less. As people in manufacturing will know there are a lot of weird and wonderful shift patterns out there, panama, four on four off, double and treble day shifts etc, but people do tend to prefer these from experience as they offer greater earning potential.
For engineers in manufacturing, the salary and shift patterns are the two main drivers. A lot of companies offer brilliant benefits such as onsite physio because it’s a physical job, as well as competitive pension contributions, healthcare and so on. Holidays are pretty standard - a minimum of 25 days, usually.
Progression is another driving factor. I did a poll on LinkedIn about this a few weeks ago - I asked my network what they would like for their role in 2023. The options were a pay rise, training, progression/promotion, or if they were happy as they were. The majority said they wanted a pay rise, and this was closely followed by progression and training. Very few were happy where they were.
Do you have any predictions for 2023?
I think job flow will remain good, because there’s still a noticeable candidate shortage - especially when it comes to engineers. We still have a lot of roles for quality professionals, production, leaders, and planners - there’s a lot more of these candidates, which is great.
There will be more positions to fill, and the main challenge will be sourcing candidates - if businesses aren’t bang on market rate with what they’re offering candidates, or offering above, they will struggle to sell their business to the people they need.
We recruit people in a variety of different ways - referrals are the big one, via our large candidate database built up over many years, as well as using LinkedIn - the older routes such as job boards have become less and less effective.
For that reason, going into 2023, I think our main priorities as manufacturing recruiters will be utilise our existing candidate relationships, and support our clients on securing the top talent when the market at the moment is so candidate-led.
Let Scantec help your manufacturing business find the top talent
If your manufacturing business is hiring, get in touch with Scantec for help with finding the top talent to fill your roles.
