Thirty years of engineering. A careers page from 2019.
You are competing for mechanical and electrical engineers against software companies paying more for work that is, by any honest measure, less interesting. You are losing, and the reason is not salary alone.
Two companies, same candidate, Tuesday evening.
- Engineering blog with real technical posts
- Team on video, talking about what they build
- Founders active and reachable
- Office footage, culture, people his age
- Glassdoor reviews from this year
- A clear answer to "what would I work on"
- A careers page linking to a job portal
- One corporate film, four years old, drone shots and a voiceover
- Leadership photographed at award ceremonies
- No engineer visible anywhere
- Reviews from 2019
- A product catalogue as a PDF
He picks the first one. Your work is more consequential and he has no way to know that.
Put the shop floor where he can see it.
A machine your team designed, filmed running, with the engineer who designed it explaining the problem it solved. Monthly. That is the whole strategy and it takes a day a month to produce once the access is sorted.
The same footage does three other jobs: it gives your dealers something to send, it gives procurement heads a reason to specify you at design stage rather than tender stage, and it gives an analyst something to look at other than capacity utilisation.
Cyclicality is not a story problem. Being unable to explain your position through the cycle is.
Your sustainability report is the most-read thing you publish.
It goes to the board, to institutional investors with mandates, and increasingly to customers with their own supply chain reporting to file. It is currently written by the company secretary's office to satisfy a requirement. Written properly, it is a hundred pages of genuine proof about safety, emissions and supply chain that you are already legally obliged to produce.
The Manufacturing Playbook
Written for people who run listed companies. Useful whether or not we ever speak.