WEBINAR: Why Qualified Candidates are Harder to Find than Ever (and How to Adapt)
Summary of the Webinar
I'd had a quality engineer role open for over a year. Every candidate who came through was the wrong fit, and honestly, our pay range was based on guesswork — nobody could tell me if it was actually competitive. Once I pulled local labor market data and adjusted both the job description and the pay range, I hired someone within two weeks.
That data didn't just validate our numbers — it changed how I think about the market entirely. We're not just competing with other machine shops in the Denver area. We're competing with our own customers, many of whom do machining in-house. That realization reshaped how I talk to leadership about open roles, how I benchmark pay, and even how I think about retention.
The other shift was screening. I now lean on AI to handle 80-90% of initial candidate qualification. On a recent manufacturing engineer search, I had over 100 applicants — mostly not a fit. AI screening got that down to about 10 strong candidates, and we had them in the door within a week.
The thread through both changes: get deliberate on the front end, or pay for it on the back end. A bad hire in a skilled trade role doesn't just cost a salary — it costs training time, coverage gaps, and months of doing the search all over again.
I also contributed to FactoryFix's 2026 State of Industrial Hiring Benchmark Report, which digs into these trends across the industry — worth a look if you're navigating the same hiring pressures.
The goal with any stage, process, and pipeline is to move an individual from the initial phase to the final one as smoothly and efficiently as possible. This not only creates a good experience for the individual, but it’s good for the businesses on the time and cost-saving fronts.