Employer Reputation and Recruiting in Skilled Trades
For years, when the conversation turned to labor in manufacturing and the skilled trades, the answer was straightforward: post a job, offer a competitive wage, find someone with experience, and get them to work.
That world is changing. As I travel throughout the pallet industry, labour is one of the most consistent conversations I hear. Companies need production workers, forklift operators, drivers, maintenance technicians, supervisors, and future leaders. Increasingly, the challenge isn't simply finding people willing to work. It's finding good people and convincing them your company is somewhere worth working.
For business owners, finding those people is one of the best uses of their time. We spend countless hours thinking about equipment, customers, margins, technology, and growth, but great businesses are built by great people. Finding someone with the right attitude and helping them grow can impact a business for years. Owners shouldn't outsource that responsibility and expect a job posting to do the work.
Recruiting starts long before someone fills out an application. Every company has an employer reputation, intentional or not. It exists in what employees and former employees say, what candidates find online, how they're treated during an interview, and whether the job matches what they were promised.
For industries like ours, this matters because we're fighting a perception that manufacturing and pallet work is dirty, hard, mundane work with limited opportunity. Some of the work can be physical and demanding, but that stereotype misses one of the industry's best features: opportunity.
Not everyone enters the workforce with the degree, credentials, experience, or connections to walk into a traditional career. Manufacturing can give someone a first opportunity and a path to build from it. Throughout this industry, people who started repairing pallets or working on the production floor have become crew leaders, supervisors, plant managers, salespeople, or operations leaders. Those stories demonstrate that career progression is real.
The industry itself is changing too. I've walked through pallet operations using automation, sophisticated equipment, cameras, vertical all-in-one software (cough, cough), and real-time production data that would surprise people who have never stepped inside a modern facility.
That's a story worth telling, but employer reputation can't simply be a marketing exercise. You can't put pictures of smiling employees on your website, call yourself a great place to work, and expect recruiting problems to disappear. Eventually, reality catches up with the message.
The companies that compete best for labour will make the employee experience better. Compensation matters, but so does being respected, having clear expectations, working with decent equipment and software, feeling safe, and knowing that learning more can take you somewhere.
This is where leadership matters. Leaders need to invest in employee growth and skills while building a positive workplace culture. Training shouldn't be viewed as an expense or avoided because we're worried someone might leave. Richard Branson captured this perfectly: “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don't want to.” Give people opportunities to learn, improve, take on responsibility, and build a career, then create an environment where they want to stay.
Think about a new employee walking into a pallet facility. Are they shown how the operation works and why their job matters, or handed safety glasses and pointed toward a workstation? Do they understand what good performance looks like and where they could be in a few years? We spend enormous amounts of time thinking about customer onboarding because first experiences shape relationships. Why wouldn't we apply the same thinking to employees?
In a tight labor market, those experiences travel. One employee has a great experience and tells a relative, neighbor, former coworker, or friend. Suddenly your best recruiting channel isn't a job board; it's the people already working inside your building. A bad reputation does the opposite, making positions harder to fill and employees harder to retain.
That's why retention and recruiting have become almost the same conversation. If you're constantly replacing people, recruiting harder won't solve the underlying problem. You must understand why people leave and why your best people stay.
Labor pressure isn't going away. Immigration policy, demographics, automation, wages, and economic conditions will continue changing the workforce around us, and many of those forces are outside our control. Employer reputation isn't.
Companies must recognize they're competing for workers too. That changes the question from Where do we find more people? to something more valuable: Why would a great person want to work here, stay here, grow here, and tell someone else to join them? The companies that can answer that convincingly will have an advantage.
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