Why we founded hireCNC

Hiring CNC Machinists is hard. If you’re from industry and you’re reading this, then you already know about the skills shortage. You already know that manufacturing is booming, but there is a low supply of talent. It’s a problem. And it’s a problem that isn’t going away anytime soon.

We are often asked by employers, why did you start hireCNC? Why start a job board focused on CNC machining? This short blog post explains.

We own a 35 year old company called In-House Solutions, where we focus on providing software and service solutions to machine shops. We are well known for being the exclusive Mastercam reseller in Canada, where we have several thousand customers.

Through our experience with In-House, we have experienced the pain of hiring CNC machinists on 2 fronts.
 

1. Hiring CNC machinists at In-House Solutions

We employ CNC machinists/programmers at In-House to implement our solutions, and to support our customers. Like many, we explore the various channels available to us when we have an open position. Job boards are one of those channels. We’ll pick on Indeed (which we have had some success with). When we post on a giant job board like Indeed, we typically get a lot of applicants. Often times in the hundreds. But only 1-3% of the applicants are even relevant to the job we are posting. The rest of the applicants have 0 machining experience, or they live on the other side of the world. Nonetheless, there is a lot of resume “junk” for our HR team and hiring managers to sift through. We find job seekers on those sites take a “spray and pray approach.” Meaning, they click “apply” on a lot of jobs just to see what will come back.

We have historically felt job boards are a necessity, but we usually walk away disappointed.
 

2. Our customers keep asking us if we know anybody

At In-House Solutions we have thousands of customers, all of which are Machine Shops. Those customers tell us that they are having trouble hiring machinists. “We can’t find anyone”. And then they ask if we know anybody that is looking. Sometimes we are able to help them, but usually we cannot.

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So... we’ve lived (and still live) the hiring struggle at our own company. And then our customers reinforce that they are struggling as well.

But a couple of years ago we started to learn more about Niche Job Boards and Niche Recruiting agencies. By focusing on a very specific profession or industry there can be tremendous advantages. Advantages for both the hiring side and the job seeking so side. So, we decided that the CNC machining trade needed a more specialized hiring solution. At hireCNC our mission is simple. We exist to better connect Machine Shops with CNC machining talent.

How are we doing that? We have 2 channels.
 

1. Job Board | Post your job opening on hireCNC and our site visitors (CNC machinists) can apply to the job
2. Recruiting Service | hireCNC recruiters go out and proactively find the perfect machinist to join your team

It doesn’t mean the skill shortage is going away, but it does mean we can have a better recruiting and hiring experience.