In recent times there has been a great impetus towards boosting the manufacturing sector in India. Recent initiatives like ‘Make in India’ have put the focus back on reviving the country’s manufacturing ability and help scale-up businesses. While the focus has been on creating a suitable growth environment, with investments being pumped into the sector, a major focus has been on how jobs to have to be scaled to meet the desired impact. 

As the manufacturing sector grows, so does the demand for the right people who help chart this journey. Manufacturing companies have to compete with both a growing services sector and a booming start-up scene that are all vying for talent within often similar talent pools. In addition to labour market competitions, such companies face demographic shifts which mean there is a great need to evolve employee offering and meet industrial standards. With tech-driven business disruptions becoming a mainstay, it is important for companies to adopt new HR practices, and with it the appropriate use of HR tech. 

This increased hiring within manufacturing companies would also in the shape of newer competency areas as companies seek to digitalize themselves and adopt more new-age technologies to improve inefficiencies. 

Recruiting 

If manufacturers have to improve their market share and perform more productively in an age which has become dominated by an ever-expanding services sector, many today require the right set of employees. As the definition of traditional worker evolves, so have the methods to hire them. Today manufacturing companies compete with tech-driven companies in vying for the same qualified talent. 

To be successful in this, manufacturers are required to invest in recruitment tech that helps them identify the right talent pools and enables swift and accurate hiring. The fact that many anticipate severe skill shortages across labour markets today, make it even more important that manufacturers can attract the best of skilled professionals. Deloitte studies have shown an emerging skills gaps within manufacturing globally with a recent study predicting that from 2015 to 2025, nearly 3.5 million manufacturing jobs will be needed, but 2 million of these will go unfilled due to a serious shortage of qualified applicants for skilled and highly skilled production positions. In addition manufacturing companies also face brand issues when it comes to attracting talent. Using social media effectively, in addition to recruitment tech which addresses problems of both mass hiring and niche skill-based hiring, today manufacturing companies can benefit hugely from HR tech.

Retention and attrition

The next key aspect that HR tech can enable manufacturers to improve is their ability to retain key employees and thus improve their attrition numbers. Retention of key employees has grown in importance in recent times, with hiring becoming more difficult. HR tech has greatly improved the ability of modern-day companies to retain and engage their employees. This should also be followed within manufacturing companies, where often the tediousness of the job becomes a deterrent in long careers. 

Most HR departments in manufacturing sector face the problem of retaining highly skilled professionals as the ‘war for talent’ over the years has only intensified. Today they require a strong employer brand and a key focus on employee experience to retain talent that might be attracted to a better work culture or career development opportunities. HR tech enables to successfully tweak HR practices to focus more on employee growth while making them the centre of HR policy design. Social media can be leveraged to create a strong employer brand and with the help of learning tech like gamification, virtual and augmented reality, training can become effective in retaining their key talent

Dealing with future complexity within the manufacturing 

HR tech can enable companies make better and more informed future decisions and predict the change in skillset requirements more effectively. Since tech-based disruptions like the advent of robotics and automation, many of the low skilled jobs across manufacturing might get replaced, having accurate job force predictions would enable companies to fine-tune their hiring accordingly. Instead of having to let go large chunks of their workforce every time a new technology disrupts existing processes, analytics and more accurate projections can enable manufacturers to hire more efficiently and help them remain proactive. 

HR has become more digital in its operation in addition to today adopting technologies like analytics AI and automation to improve both hiring and training needs. When it comes to the manufacturing sector as a whole, recent times have seen the sector increase their hiring in great numbers. With expansion across newer markets an important focus, many legacy players in the sector have been ramping up both across the blue-collar and white-collar hiring, with staffing needs today playing a crucial role in ensuring how manufacturing companies can scale up and retain key employees while doing so.