Want to Attract Great Employees? IT That Works Helps

How hard can it be to find someone with skills, or at least the willingness to learn?  

If you're a manufacturing company, you know that finding qualified employees isn't easy. 

In the past, someone looking for a job was grateful to get an interview. Now, the tables have turned.  

Job seekers are much more selective, especially when it comes to what you have to offer them. From work-life balance and free coffee, to Zen break rooms and comprehensive benefits packages, you might even say that sometimes they are interviewing you.  

While all of these perks are nice, many manufacturing companies forget about one very important benefit – technology. It is what it is, right? “It’s how it’s always been done and we will train our new hires of this way,” you say. Wrong. But why would candidates care about the kind of technology a company has?

Yes, You'll Need to Hire Millennials

And millennials care about how good the technology they work with is – does it help them get the job done or does it get in the way? 

Your company’s commitment to technology – keeping hardware and software systems on a revolving refresh schedule – speaks volumes. 

Who cares what millennials think about technology? You should.  

Millennials have now surpassed Gen Xers to become the largest generation in the U.S. workforce (Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data). 

Adults between the ages of 18-34 now make up one in three American workers, Pew reports. They outnumbered working adults in Generation X, who were 18-33 in the year 1998, in early 2015 after overtaking Baby Boomers last year.

Millennials like tech, and they like good tech so they can go about their day and multi-task the hell out of it. If they can’t, it’s like hitting a brick wall, and chances are they won’t stick around for you to fix it.

IT Frustrates Employees. Frustrated Employees Leave.

Tenure and lifetime employment doesn’t really exist much anymore. Research shows that almost one fourth of your team will leave in a given year. If your employees aren’t happy, or frustrated with the way things are done, chances are they are going to look elsewhere. 

Life is too short to accept mediocrity, and the rising generations are used to having their problems solved with handy little apps they can download in a few seconds. 

Spending time and energy to recruit and train new employees is more time-consuming and expensive than keeping the (good) ones you have.

So what can you do as an employer to help attract the right candidates and, once you have them, keep them? First and foremost, give your company an honest 10,000 foot view assessment of your operations and workflows, specifically: 

• How are employees working with documents day to day?
• Are documents easy and logical to find and share across teams?
• Where are there bottlenecks in your manufacturing process that could be remedied with “a better way”?
• Are all of the key stakeholders in a process involved in the planning phases for future workflow enhancements?
• How are documents being stored and accessed? (physically, locally, Cloud-based) 
• Are there any key performance indicators with your customer service that might reveal areas in need of improvement? 
• How long does it take to complete your most important approvals?
• How quickly are invoices sent, received, and paid?
• How quickly can you respond to a compliance inquiry? Minutes, hours, days, weeks?
• Do you have a backup in place in the event that you lose everything?
• What is the average age of your hardware and software systems and how often have you replaced it?

If a company is willing to invest in technology, it is an indirect way of saying that it supports those who work with that technology. If your systems are out-dated and constantly slowing down operations, it just might be driving qualified candidates away from you. 

Document management software is one technology that can remove many document and process-based frustrations from your company. Check out what DM can do for your company in our free eBook. Get it below.