If you run a small or mid-sized manufacturing company, this probably sounds familiar: You need people. Machinists. Maintenance techs. Controls engineers. Younger workers who can grow with the business.
And yet the resumes don't come in. Or they do, and they're not close to what you’re looking for.
The skilled labor gap is real. Retirements are accelerating. Fewer young workers are choosing manufacturing. And when they do look, they're comparing your job posting to tech companies, logistics firms, and healthcare systems with polished recruitment pages and clear career paths.
Here's the uncomfortable part: most manufacturing job ads read like internal HR documents, not recruiting tools. They list requirements. They list compliance. They list what you need.
They rarely answer what candidates actually care about:
- What's the work really like?
- Will I be trained?
- Is this a dead-end job or a career?
- Is this place modern or stuck in 1997?
When experienced workers retire, knowledge leaves with them. Process shortcuts. How machines actually behave. Institutional memory that took decades to build.
When there's no system for training or mentoring, you're forced to hire externally. But external hiring only works if the right people see your opening and believe it's worth applying. And don’t forget the passive job seeker that may be the perfect fit but isn’t looking right now.
This is where job postings quietly become strategic.
We talk to manufacturers all the time who say, "We can't find people." But when we look at their postings, the story gets more complicated. The jobs sound rigid. Transactional. Not competitive. Not human.
A CNC operator posting shouldn't read like an ISO procedure. It should read like an opportunity.
You can't fix what you don't measure. Most manufacturers don't test their job ads at all.
There's real value in applying marketing logic to workforce challenges. That means treating job postings like campaigns: reviewing language, structure, and emotional pull. Understanding what signals growth versus burnout. Stability versus stagnation. Pride versus just punching a clock.
With that kind of analysis, you can start to see where postings unintentionally repel younger workers, where you're overselling requirements and underselling opportunity, and where recruiting language doesn't match what you actually offer in training and retention.
Better job ads won't solve workforce shortages on their own. But bad ones absolutely make them worse.
If you want knowledge transfer to work, you need people worth transferring knowledge to. If you want training programs to matter, you need applicants who plan to stay. If you want to grow capacity, you need roles that sound like careers, not chores.
The labor gap is structural. Demographic. Long-term. But your job postings are something you can control right now.
Manufacturers already know how to improve processes on the shop floor. This is the same discipline applied to hiring: observe, measure, improve, repeat.
Workforce development starts before the first interview. It starts with how you describe the work itself.
Contact us to see how we can assist your organization!