Matt Reynolds: All right, Casey, welcome to the podcast. And why don't you kind of give us some big picture takeaways on hiring for packaging line operators?
Casey Flanagan: All right. Absolutely. And thanks for taking the time. So the first thing that I covered and was asking questions about from from the Cpgs was hiring specifically hiring for packaging line operators. And what I learned was that there's hiring challenges across categories, whether it's totally green new newcomers to the industry that need training before they are able to really operate that machinery...
Matt Reynolds: So that would be like the unskilled right?
Casey Flanagan: Exactly, yeah. So the word that I use to kind of summarize that type of worker, unskilled, and that really just means that they need that training before they're really up to speed. And so looking at those unskilled packaging operators, what I found was that 58% find it somewhat difficult and 58% of the CPGs I mean, find it somewhat difficult to find these workers. 20% find it very difficult. So that means 78% total are having trouble finding workers that don't even don't have the industry experience yet that are just totally new coming into here. So 11% find it easy and another 11% aren't hiring this type of worker.
Matt Reynolds: So that's a pretty significant amount so we're close to 80% are having trouble.
Casey Flanagan: Exactly, yeah. And then the challenge increases for skilled operators who are coming in with experience and already have some savvy with machinery. So I found that 43% are finding it somewhat difficult to hire these workers, which is a little bit less than the than the unskilled, but much more are finding great difficulty. 42% are finding great difficulty in hiring skilled workers.
Matt Reynolds: Yeah, I was going to say so just to draw that into stark relief, both categories, let's say skilled and unskilled. Roughly, 75-80% are having trouble finding it, finding those employees. But if you look at the unskilled, only 20% find it very difficult, which is a large enough number as it is. But when you upskill, when you move up the chain to the skilled operators, that's 42% find it very difficult, which is almost twice as many. So the problem is really exacerbated when you go up the skill chain.
Casey Flanagan: Exactly. And so then in both categories, about five to 10% are finding it easy and then the other 10% are just simply not hiring. So it's interesting that at 80% overall, as you say, here are seeking these workers and also struggling to do so.
Matt Reynolds: Okay. So and so what are some reasons. I mean you did both the qualitative questions that we put to our audience, but you also did some interviews. I know after after that, what are some of the reasons you found for these challenges?
Casey Flanagan: Yeah. So we did an open ended question as one of our survey questions and that question was asking about these companies outlook. They're 12 month outlook just generally how do they feel the package and workforce just allowing them to have some some room to say exactly what they feel. And we got a lot of responses directly related to hiring within that.
So one of the major themes that I saw come out of that was competition. So we've got a few that were along the lines of saying it's harder to recruit in rural areas due to competition, which makes them bring about an examination of their hiring and benefits packages. And then another I saw said that pay constraints in their own company are making it hard to compete.
So their operations, the limitations that they're finding are making it hard to be one of those companies that's offering a really competitive and attractive salary.
