Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 15:37 — 12.5MB)
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
So it’s week 47 of 2018, and I appreciate you taking the time to listen in to us here at Warehouse and Operations as a Career! I’m Marty T Hawkins and I we try and bring you some useful and interesting information each week, at least maybe provoking a thought or two that’ll help you with your careers and career planning. We try and share our experiences and love hearing about yours as well. Please take a moment to email us, host@warehouseandoperationsasacareer.com if you have any questions, comments or topics you’d like us to look into for ya.
Ok, lets see, so this week I’ve had the opportunity to work with recruiting. Don’t know how much help I’ve been but I’ve lended a hand with placing ads or positions to the different job boards, and social media postings, I even helped with a Job Fair! You know recruiting is where it all starts for us as applicants, I had a lot of fun and really enjoyed helping to pair great employees with just the right companies and putting people to work, and getting them started, or at least seeing that they have the opportunity to turn those jobs into long lasting careers. I have no problem sharing with you that I find recruiting to be one of the most stressful and challenging jobs I’ve had to do throughout the years. As a warehouse manager I use to interview any order selectors, fork lift operators, sanitation, really for all the positions under my watch. Our HR generalist did a pretty good job pre-screening the applicants for us but then I had to determine if the position was going to be a good fit for the job and that the company and task was going to match the applicants needs too. I want to feel like I made some good decisions, more than a few of my hires went on to become supervisors, managers, directors and even several Vice Presidents within the corporations! I had to learn the hard way, more often than not I went with the old gut feeling. If the prospect knew the terminology, could convince me he or she knew what they were doing they’d end up getting a chance. Throughout the years I’ve been fortunate enough to hire several hundred individuals, many took the job and worked it into a long term career, a lot of them are still friends of mine today!
Today’s recruiters have so much more insight into our lives, personalities and our work histories, things move at a much quicker pace. It takes only minutes to check with our work references, back ground checks are all but immediate, some drug screenings are instant. And don’t even get me started again on our Social Media profiles, we’ve talked about our profiles several times on other episodes, and each recruiter we’ve had as a guest on the show has urged us to make sure they depict the personality and life styles we want them to see. It’s almost a guarantee that our hiring agent is heading straight to our social pages as soon as our telephone interview is wrapped up.
Anyway, I love recruiting, I wish I was better at it, I guess I’m real comfortable with the sourcing, reviewing the resumes, and I really like both the phone interview and face to face interviewing but man, theres a lot more paperwork involved now than back in my day. Now I get to help out every once and a while, like this week, and that gives me my fix for another 6 months or so.
So I’ll share a few of my wins and losses I had this week with ya! One win was with a gentleman who’d only been employed with this company for about 2 months, I’d met him earlier, while he was interviewing for the position and really liked him. The recruiter that was hiring him had asked me to look over his resume and work history for her, he’d listed a lot of warehouse experience and she wasn’t sure it was all legit. I spent maybe 3 minutes with him and concluded he was a pure Op’s guy and wished him luck. She hired him and her customer really liked him, he was rocking it over on his docks. As can happen though, one of his facilities big orders was hung up in transit and they we’re going to have a 2 to 3 week layoff until the order could come in, and him being the last hired it looked like he’d be the one to get the news. The gentleman had taken one of my cards, and a WAOC card as well, anyway he reached out to myself as well as the recruiter he’d worked with before. We both knew of another position hiring this week and I’m happy to say he started Tuesday, only missing 1 day of earnings! He never presented anything negative, he reached out for some help and she was able to find him something that was even closer to his home and at the same pay rate. I think its even a better opportunity for growth too. We’ll stay in contact with him, who knows, maybe I could reach out to him in about 6 months and get him to share his success story with us on an episode!
Here’s one that left me shaking my head. I’ve actually done a little digging on the history of this gentleman, but I haven’t found anything too far out of the ordinary, I still don’t know what happened. So a recruiter said she had a gentleman on the phone and that he was upset and asked if I’d like to speak with him. I answered, introduced myself and he said “are you going to give me a job”. I had pulled up his information, by the way, for anyone that doesn’t know, Staffing agencies, any employer actually, keep an employee file on every associate they’ve hired. It’ll contain information like our hire dates, dependent information, our interview sheets as well as all our placement’s, how long we worked at each one, any corrective actions we may have had and reasons for our departure. A lot of this information is good for things like employment verifications for apartments or when we’re purchasing a car and of course when we’re looking for employment later on or again. So I asked the gentleman what’s he been doing for the last 14 months, you know what type of work. He’d been a General Labor and Utility with them previously and I was wondering if he’d been exposed to any equipment or maybe different positions recently. His answer was “that doesn’t matter, I didn’t need to know if he’d been working anywhere, was I going to give him a job”. I started to explain I’d like to understand what all he’s qualified to do so I could check the open orders for a good fit. Well about half way through my thought the applicant started cussing at me and hung up? Of course, if you know me at all, I had to do a little digging, wondering what could have been done a little differently or produced a better outcome here. I think the core issue could have been, you probably guessed it, my favorite word, Communication. The candidate had been placed at 3 facilities over a period of about a year and a half. The first two he’d been reassigned due to attendance problems. I think the young man had some car problems, they were legit and certainly understandable, things like that are going to happen. The third time there appeared to be some notes about a family component, maybe a girlfriend issue, anyway again he’d been dismissed due to attendance. From what I could tell the gentleman had called twice before and his recruiter had asked about his transportation opportunities and had made a note that he had resolved everything and had some good dependable transportation now. She explained that she didn’t have any G/L positions right now but that she’d give him a call when something came in, that she received new orders weekly. It looks like he called back the next day and got a different recruiter and was told the same thing. I certainly understand the frustration, the gentleman needs a job, he needs some income. When your told I’ll give you a call as soon as something becomes available, it’s hard not to want to call back and check on it, and I don’t feel there’s anything wrong with that but I think we have to be prepared to hear the same thing without getting frustrated or defensive. In this case the gentleman had landed with someone that had the resources to have really helped him. Having direct contact with customers and so many Op’s guys in the field sometimes I can make a few calls, even with no open position, when I’ve found someone that’d be a perfect fit with an organization, I can occasionally get them an interview anyway. Now don’t get me wrong, the gentlemen didn’t do anything wrong, I didn’t mind his vulgarities, I know he was just very frustrated, he needed a job right then. I don’t know if I would have been able to help him at all but now we’ll never know!
Here’s one that really bothered me. Two gentlemen were having words on a loading dock, those words lead to one man hitting the other one. Both men were dismissed and lost their jobs. Workplace violence is a real issue and today there’s no company that’s going to tolerate it. There’s absolutely no reason for anyone to touch another person in the workplace. During the investigation I found that the supervisor on the floor determined that the employee that was on the receiving end of the punch had really restrained himself, and had tried to defuse the situation. He wanted to have kept him on but felt like he’d contributed to the mouthing off and talking smack just as much as the other individual. His decision was to let them both go.
I spoke with this individual, the employee that got hit, expressing that the proper action would have been to report the problem as soon as it started to his supervisor. He understood what I was saying but didn’t feel like he should have been terminated, in his eyes it wasn’t his fault. I certainly see his side but the bottom line is he was, and like it or not, there is no grey area with workplace violence. The fact that he had joined in and argued with the other employee were actually grounds for termination at this facility. It doesn’t necessarily mean that he can’t be placed again, I think he did the right thing coming to his hiring agency and sharing his side of things. There will of course be an investigation and based on what all I’ve heard so far I’m sure he’ll find another position pretty quickly. We’ve spoke about work place violence on a couple of different episodes, please don’t get involved in these situations. The police could have actually been called, the other guy could have found himself with an assault charge even.
And one of my favorite experiences this week, shouldn’t say favorite I guess because I really enjoyed talking with everyone all week long but this one made me feel good. So a person applied for a G/L position, had a resume which listed a little unloading and sanitation experience, sailed through the phone interview and was asked to come in for an in person visit. Talk about super excited, he’d just moved to the area 2 weeks ago, gotten the family settled in and started his job search using the different Facebook job’s groups. One of the first he saw was for an unloader, so he applied. While speaking with him, we talked about his last two positions in detail, or I thought we had. I asked if he had ever thought about getting some equipment training or had any plans for learning more about warehousing and advancement. He said certainly, after all working is about making money. He went on to say that he had about 4 years on a Toyota sit-down counterbalance lift, and about 2 years driving a standup lift and about a year using a slip-sheet attachment on it. I was a little wow’ed with his experience and asked why he hadn’t added any of that to his resume? He said he thought since he was applying for a G/L position he needed to show that he’d done that before. You know, as true as that thought was, I mean, If he had only written his equipment experiences and replied with that, who knows, he might not have been called in for the interview. The day before there were no operator positions. Although I see the logic and can appreciate that he was just wanting to get his foot in the door somewhere I think we should list all our accomplishments, always! Maybe add that we’re willing to start out doing something else, but I’d add everything. Possibly the phone interview is the place to bring up more about our experiences, I think its fine to list everything, but the important thing is to communicate our experiences, plan and goals to the hiring agent! Anyway, I was able to help place him as a forklift driver making 26% more than the position he’d walked in the door for.
What I learned this week was that Recruiters are there to help us, to place us in positions we can succeed at. It’s in their interest to fill those jobs for their companies. As we’ve discussed here at WAOC it’s our responsibility to be honest, respectable, prepared and ready to talk with them. We have such a short window to get so many points across. I could tell who had prepared for the interview and who just came to an interview.
Getting a job is one part of our struggle and the more important part is keeping it, turning it into our career. Remember, as our buddy Joe expresses to us all too often, that it’s called work for a reason. It’s so important to keep our minds on the job when we’re there. If we’re doing that, we won’t be talking smack with or about anybody. Things to argue about won’t come up. If we’re doing our job we can’t get into any trouble, we’ll only succeed.
Well that’s my week, I hope you’ve had a great week as well. It’s a Holiday week for us here in the states, time for family and friends. Shoot us an email to host@warehouseandoperationsasacareer.com and share your week with the group! Until next week, Happy Thanksgiving and have a Safe week ahead!