It is increasingly difficult to hire maintenance technicians with the skills and experience needed to effectively maintain your plant’s equipment and keep the lines running. Often, traditional methods of interviewing and assessing candidates, such as oral interviews or discussions about prior work experience, are not effective in determining the best applicants to hire.
Hiring Ineffectively is Costly
In our extensive experience with clients, we see them encounter the following issues with hiring the right maintenance technicians:
- The applicants are hired based on their experience or ability to interview well, not their skillset
- 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 unqualified maintenance technicians:
- 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 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 to hire better maintenance personnel:
- Identify the skills needed by maintenance personnel that are most critical to supporting your operation
- Use an objective, valid entrance exam to assess for these skills in prospective candidates
- Develop a consistent testing process using an effective online system to conduct reliable testing prior to hire