Hiring maintenance technicians has become an increasingly difficult process. It’s challenging to find maintenance technicians who have undergone maintenance technician training and possess the skills and experience needed to effectively maintain your plant’s equipment and keep the lines running. Often, clients utilize traditional methods of interviewing and assessing maintenance technician candidates, such as oral interviews or discussions about prior work experience, rather than having candidates take a maintenance technician test that will assess the specific skills necessary to support your operation.
Hiring Maintenance Technicians Ineffectively is Costly
In our extensive experience with clients, we see them encounter the following issues when hiring maintenance technicians:
- The applicants are hired based on their experience or ability to interview well, not their maintenance technician training and skill set
- The applicants may be hired based on their experience as a maintenance technician in a prior role, but the skillset is much different than what is required at your operation
Our experience with Foods processors has shown that turnover is high and is often due to poor hiring decisions.
Below are some of the costs associated with hiring maintenance technicians that are unqualified:
- Increased downtime, scrap costs, and/or third-party contractors due to skill gaps in new maintenance personnel
- Additional hiring costs due to turnover due to lack of skills
- Wasted maintenance technician training costs on employees who do not stay at the company for long
- Opportunity costs incurred by not having a skilled maintenance technician on the job
Our Solution
Perform the following when hiring maintenance technicians:
- Identify the skills needed by maintenance technicians that are most critical to supporting your operation
- Use an objective, valid maintenance technician test to assess for these skills in prospective candidates
- Develop a consistent maintenance technician test process using an effective online system to conduct reliable testing prior to hire