Microchips aren’t the only shortage plaguing the auto industry jobs right now – workers are in short supply, too, from the smallest Tier 3 supplier to the shop floor of the largest assembly plants, showrooms, and dealership service areas nationwide.
And just as it has with microchips, the industry as a whole finds itself competing for an unexpectedly scarce resource with other companies eager to fill the gaps in their own value chains. To improve their odds in the face of stiff competition, auto industry employers will need to be more creative and open-minded.
As veteran Automotive News journalist Lindsay Chappell detailed, the number of motor vehicle employees grew over the summer, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, but still lags far behind where the industry was at the start. of the pandemic.
Digging deeper into the automotive supply chain, US auto plants and suppliers have 73,400 fewer workers on the job than when the pandemic hit in March 2020. That’s nearly 1 in 5 of the 378,000 manufacturing jobs in the USA lost during that period.
While the United States faces “great resignation” from dissatisfied workers, the auto industry may open new doors to welcome potential employees as it reconsiders a number of expectations.
Distributors often especially brag that their employees are their greatest asset, but they often keep under the radar when it comes to finding and cultivating those assets in meaningful ways. For example, conducting criminal and credit background checks on prospective employees may be a prudent precaution in some cases.
But automatically removing imperfect candidates from further consideration, without further investigation into the circumstances of those imperfections in your records, can leave a potential quality employee on the table. It’s probably not wise to put a convicted embezzler in the finance and insurance office, but there’s no reason someone caught in a misdemeanor drug offense shouldn’t be a good technician jobs.
Many companies have used the pandemic to rethink a number of practices: their hours of operation, their flexibility about remote work, and their compensation packages, especially as a growing number of baby boomers retire. Suppliers, automakers and distributors will have to do the same to find and retain the workers this vital industry desperately needs.
Source: Automotive News
