By Peter Shillito, Partner, Shillito Group

One of the oddest things we see in recruitment is a completely modern manufacturing business using a very old job description. The machinery has changed. The systems have changed. There is more automation. There is more data. The business has grown. The customers may have changed. Then somebody leaves, and someone opens the job description from 2021.  

Replacement is a useful moment to ask a different question  

The normal question is “How do we replace them?” I would ask: “If we were creating this job from scratch today, would we create the same job?” Sometimes yes. Manufacturing still needs deep technical experience. Thirty years of plant knowledge does not suddenly become worthless because someone has installed a new piece of software.  

The market is already showing us that  

When we benchmark salaries, we increasingly find that the title tells us less than the scope. A purchasing support role may sit in a tight market band. Move into a Buyer role and the range can widen sharply because the title might cover anything from operational purchasing to strategic sourcing, technical suppliers, significant spend and international procurement. 

Same title. Completely different job.  

Digitalisation makes old job descriptions dangerous  

A maintenance role starts touching controls. A production role starts touching data. A planning job becomes more systems-heavy. An operations manager needs to understand automation projects. The temptation is to keep adding these requirements onto the old brief until it reads like three people stapled together. 

You don’t always want the person who has done exactly the same job  

Manufacturing quite rightly values relevant experience. But there comes a point where demanding somebody from exactly the same sector, using exactly the same machinery, with exactly the same systems and exactly the same background starts removing people who could bring something useful. We have seen searches where plenty of strong candidates exist around the core job, but the field collapses once every preferred credential becomes essential. That is not an argument for lowering standards. It is an argument for being clear what the standard actually is.  

Is the business buying knowledge, capability, judgement, potential or specific technical competence? Those are not always the same thing. 

CVs look backwards  

A CV is mostly a record of what somebody has already done. A manufacturer increasingly needs to judge whether that person can cope with what the business will ask them to do next. Adaptability and learning therefore become more valuable. Someone who has successfully moved between systems, functions or environments may be a safer bet than someone whose CV perfectly matches yesterday’s factory.  

Experience still matters 

Every manufacturing business has people who know things that are not written down anywhere. They hear when a machine is not right. They know which customer requirement always causes trouble. They remember the last time a particular change was attempted. You cannot download that experience. The strongest businesses probably need both: keep the knowledge, develop the people who hold it, introduce new capability and make sure the two actually mix.  

Hire for where you are going  

A vacancy is one of the few moments when a company can redesign part of its organisation without creating another position. It is worth using it. 

 “Are we recruiting for the factory we have now, the factory we had five years ago, or the factory we are trying to build next?”