St. Cloud, MN
619 W St. Germain St., Suite 214
St Cloud, MN 56301
(320) 203-4840
Green Bay, WI
520 N Broadway, Suite 270
Green Bay WI, 54303
(920) 884-1496
High Need + High Expectations
A manufacturing recruitment strategy that performed.
Industry
Service
The challenge
R&M Manufacturing is a full-service sheet metal fabrication company working out of a 100,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in the Twin Cities metro region of Minnesota. Founded in 1969, R&M Manufacturing has over 50 years of proven excellence in their industry. They offer precision metal fabrication, all the way from design, tool building, fabrication, and assembly to packaging.
R&M initially came to Vye in 2017 with a website rebuild project. Their website at the time was extremely dated and offered little-to-no value when it came to online lead generation.
Did we knock it out of the park? Yes.
But this is not that story. This is the story of an epic recruitment campaign.
Covid-19 kicked off perhaps the most challenging employment shortage in modern history for the manufacturing industry. To say that the Covid-19 pandemic put manufacturing companies at risk is an understatement. From production lows and shutdowns to production overloads (in some cases, upwards of 180% capacity) coupled with supply chain pressures driven by unrealistic timelines and materials and logistics challenges. All of this, while enforcing new safety protocols in order to ward off an untimely shutdown due to a Covid-19 outbreak.
On top of all of those issues, the manufacturing industry (and just about every other industry) has seen enormous challenges in hiring qualified staff. R&M was no exception. They struggled to fill key roles, which, in turn, caused significant issues in production. They set out to solve this challenge by employing the help of Vye to:
- Find qualified candidates through untapped avenues
- Nurture candidates with quality content
- Convert prospects into applicants
The solution
As a country, we are experiencing unemployment rates unlike anything we’ve seen in recent years. According to the Congressional Research Service, “The unemployment rate peaked at an unprecedented level, not seen since data collection started in 1948, in April 2020 (14.8%) before declining to a still-elevated level in December (6.7%).” Despite this, it seems to be an impossible task for many manufacturing companies to find qualified workers.
This had become such a prevalent issue across all of our manufacturing clients that our team at Vye conducted research to figure out what was going on and how to circumvent the existing barriers. We partnered with an economic development center, as well as several manufacturing associations, to collect data and insights. Ultimately, this led to the creation of an extremely robust pillar page resource to help our current and prospective manufacturing clients tackle these hiring issues. You can see that full resource here.
This research certainly played a role in developing a recruitment strategy for R&M. We were able to leverage our insight to identify three key tactics to employ:
- Update key website pages with user-centric content to attract quality candidates
- Create a compelling video to help candidates better understand R&M as an employer
- Distribute the video and career opportunities through paid media on social channels
The results
When it comes to recruitment campaigns, there is really only one metric that matters: Did efforts land hires?
Not only have efforts resulted in hires, but our strategic efforts have helped fill some incredibly technical roles that R&M had struggled to fill. Within the first several months of the campaign, R&M hired four candidates for highly sought-after roles such as: design engineer and press brake operators. Prior to working with Vye, R&M had received zero responses for those positions. This early success led us to continue efforts.
Taking back control
The pandemic has posed many challenges, but our goal was to help R&M take back control of their production output by fulfilling their hiring needs. When you consider all the barriers - unemployment benefits, lack of childcare options, safety concerns, highly competitive employment opportunities, etc - this was an enormous undertaking.
We were extremely honored to help R&M regain control through recruitment efforts, and look forward to continuing this partnership.
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