Episode Details

Connect with Ann Wyatt

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/awyattrecruits/

Website: https://www.annwyattrecruiting.com/

Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm excited to introduce our guest today, Ann Wyatt. Ann is President of Ann Wyatt recruiting. She's very passionate about workforce development and building a solid quality team, focusing on manufacturing. Her goal is to connect the right people to the right jobs. Ann, welcome to the show.

Ann Wyatt: Lisa, thank you so much for having me.

Lisa Ryan: Absolutely. Please share a bit about your background, how you got started in recruiting, and why the focus is on manufacturing.

Ann Wyatt: Sure. I started my recruiting agency. I got into recruiting because I'm very passionate about workforce development. My first job after graduating college was working for the career Center. I worked my way up through the career Center. I enjoyed the jobs portion, matching the candidates with the companies and working with local area employers on job fairs. After that, I worked with the greenfield sites and hired new or existing candidates from the labor market, creating and developing labor market information profiles for economic development.

In 2015, I decided that it was starting to get tight. We're already starting to see a tight candidate pool at that time. I decided that I could do a better service to the community by leaving the state and starting my own recruiting company, focusing strictly on manufacturing. Firstly, I picked manufacturing because it made up most of the workforce in the local area Bowling green, Kentucky, where I'm from. The wages were higher in manufacturing than in other industry sectors, so we had to work all positions when I was looking. When I was looking at the different industry sectors like health care, customer service, retail, and manufacturing, the wages were substantially higher in manufacturing than in other industries. I thought that somebody didn't have to have a college degree to go into manufacturing, and they could make perfect money.

So, that was quite inspiring to me. I wanted to stick with the manufacturing and develop those relationships with the local area employers even further. One of the things we're seeing is the numbers all over the board.

Lisa Ryan: With 2.8 million manufacturing jobs going unfilled by 2028 and all these other statistics that are out there, many manufacturers are all fighting over the same people. One of your areas of expertise is working with your clients on the candidate experience. A lot of times, they post a job. They don't think about it, or, as you say, they post and pray, and then whoever walks in the door doesn't think about it.

It starts from the starting point of their candidates' experience. So what are some of how you've seen companies successfully elevate their candidate experience?

Ann Wyatt: That's a great question, Lisa. I think that companies are still getting acclimated to the fact that this is a candidate-driven market. They have to put a lot more effort into recruiting quality talent than they were previously. They're used to the idea of posting job descriptions on a job board and just hoping and praying for the best.

Companies with the most success and recruiting top talent are going through those extra steps to build a relationship with a candidate. From the moment they apply for the position, whether things like getting back to them or leaving them with an automated or canned response or no response. Whether that's having a great marketing and branding strategy where they do video job descriptions or creating interactive job descriptions that tell the candidate a little bit more about the company, their story, their brand, and their history. Whether that's being j