SelectOne Blog

The manufacturing landscape has changed over the past couple decades as technology influences all aspects of the business. From the designing of products to assembly and delivery, each step in manufacturing requires a higher level of knowledge and skill. Finding new talent is a formidable hurdle that HR departments are not equipped to face. Professional recruiting firms provide a solution to these challenges.

According to a report from Deloitte, the shortage of engineers in the manufacturing space leaves 600,000 positions unfilled annually. There are fewer candidates with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Technology) backgrounds and graduates with STEM skills are gravitating to the perceived more exciting software development field. Manufacturing recruiters face a considerable challenge finding qualified engineers in today’s marketplace. What are the best practices for recruiting engineers?

Industrial robots go back decades, first introduced in the American automotive factories in the 1960s. These initial robots did simple and repetitive tasks, such as handling hot and heavy die-cast parts. Later in the decade robots were adapted for spot welding tasks, but they were still not in very wide use.

Every time a new job board or search technology launches or becomes popular, the common refrain is about the pending doom of the staffing industry.

Years ago, job boards like Monster and Career Builder and other search technologies were touted by some as a death knell for search firms, since any company could search and contact candidates on their own. Then came LinkedIn, Indeed and many others.  And yet our industry is thriving, with search and placement revenue growing at an annual rate of 8%, but how is this possible?

It’s possible because job boards and search technology are missing one key component inherent to recruiters – the ability to compel action.   

Blogs are a great way to stay up-to-date on current events, stimulate creativity, and explore topics of interest in more depth. Reading industry specific blogs provides new perspectives and best practices that can directly influence your daily work. Check out this list of our top 10 engineering and manufacturing blogs:

What would a business today be without technology? As a millennial, it’s almost impossible for me to imagine and for many businesses it’s becoming that way too.

IT staffing is ranked as the second largest segment of staffing in terms of revenue, and is expected to grow 6% in 2016 to $27.2 billion.

As technology is advancing, senior leaders and CIOs are now recognizing the importance technology plays on the company’s overall success. In fact, 22% of CIOs are looking to build out their IT department within the first six months of 2016 due to such rapid technological advances. There’s only one problem… 60% of CIOs in the U.S. find it challenging to recruit skilled IT professionals. 

The tech industry has been long dominated by males, with women only representing an average of 30% of the industry. In 1984, 37% of all computer-science graduates were women. Today, this number is only 18%.

Heads Up Display, Inc is a Buffalo based tech startup building a notification system that allows the workers in hazardous environments to make data driven decisions in real-time.  

As part of our ongoing interview blog series with entrepreneurs impacting the Buffalo startup community, we sat down with Clark Dever, Co-Founder of Heads Up Display.

When recruiting top talent in today’s workforce, soft skills are sometimes considered to be more valued than technical skills. Technical skills can be easily taught, but emotional intelligence and the ability to connect with other individuals is an innate trait.

Technical skills alone are no longer what drives an employer to hire you. It’s the combination of soft skills and your technical skills that will influence business results.

According to a recent Gallup survey, employees with a “higher degree of soft-skills competency brings improved effectiveness and improved organizational results, and that in turn drives greater employee engagement and retention.” 

Q&A with 2015 43North Winner ACV Auctions CTO, Dan Magnuszewski

The rate of change is accelerating at a breakneck pace. As of Q3 2015, Facebook employed nearly 12,000 people and has a market cap approaching [gasp] $300 billion; ten years ago Facebook was being run out of a dorm room. Salesforce was founded 15 years ago and employs over 16,000 people, with a market cap in excess of $36 billion. I could go on to list more obvious tech companies even the least informed person would recognize – Uber, Tesla, Zynga, Twitter, Lyft, Instagram, WhatsApp – pointing out impressive job creation numbers and staggering valuations conjured in mere months and years, not decades or generations.

Five years ago in Buffalo the startup scene barely had a pulse. There were a few companies that had launched (Campus Labs and Liazon, notably, have gone onto very successful exits), but there were very few notable successful exits at that time (Synacor among them). With a rise in persistent, passionate community catalysts and successful serial entrepreneurs, the context for more frequent kinetic collisions was set in motion. Perhaps the largest manifestation of this evolving ecosystem is the 43North business plan competition, also known as the world’s largest business idea competition. The theory is that startups and high growth companies are fueling and increasingly driving economic prosperity.

The winner of the 2015 43North Competition was one of Buffalo’s very own, ACV Auctions.  ACV Auctions is a live wholesale marketplace for dealer-only automobile auctions. Conducted via a smartphone application, ACV creates liquidity for wholesale inventory (trade-ins and aged automobiles) 24 hours a day. An intuitive 5 minute process of snapping pictures and drafting a vehicle description launches an auction to 100's of registered buyers.