Chad Schron is the senior director for Tooling U-SME and the co-founder of the original Tooling U. While working at his grandfather’s machine shop, Chad had the idea for an online manufacturing training school to help solve the skilled labor shortage. In his current position, Chad leads the Sales, Learning Services, Client Services, Technology, Content, and Operations teams for Tooling U– SME. Chad recently spoke with Robert Brooks, editor in chief of American Machinist, about a new program designed to help manufacturers find, train, and retain the talent necessary to fill the industrial labor pipeline.
Below is an excerpt from the podcast:
AM: The program that you're introducing is called Ready to Hire. Briefly tell us how it will work.
CS: So, if you think about traditional manufacturing hiring, an HR manager posts a job description up on one of the bulletin boards. And lots of resumes come in, and then they have to sift through all those resumes. Don't really know who has the right skills to meet the jobs. You reach out to some of the candidates. You get no response back from them. Ultimately, it is a very expensive and slow process, and even once you eventually hire a candidate, they have oftentimes very high turnover. Some candidates don't make it past the first week or even the first day on the job. So, it's ultimately a very expensive and slow process.
Ready to Hire is a new program designed to hire entry-level manufacturing talent. It is a model that's proved out very well in the healthcare industry. The healthcare industry is having some of the same labor challenges that manufacturing is. So, we're bringing in this new model into manufacturing, where employers will be able to commit to a minimum number of hires. We will then go out, find those candidates who meet those qualifications, train them up to a standard body of knowledge, and then help you then to retain that talent pool. In the healthcare industry, they saw an over 85% increase in higher rate from when you interview a candidate to hiring them, 50% reduction in onboarding time, and a 94% reduction in turnover.
AM: In the announcement that you sent to me, Tooling U explains that “by moving the training up front, Ready to Hire delivers a risk-free talent pipeline that can flex up or down as needed by each organization.” So tell me, what is meant by train to hire?