Problem statement
What does this discussion solve? What is the problem it is addressing?
Help industrial startups improve their recruiting and hiring practices.
- Industrial startups can’t find talent
- Manufacturing Industry has an imminent workforce shortage
- Startups working on the talent shortage problem
- Building your team: playbook and challenges
DC - I think 4 should be the main focus. It will provide the most value to our community. 1 and 2 provide insights into the problem. 3 introduces ways to resolve the problem.
- Getting a recruiter who specializes in this area as a speaker could be beneficial
1. Industrial startups can’t find talent
Mixer between startup founders and engineering organizations
Problem space
- Hiring
- Talented people don’t think of or see the opportunity in industrials
- Talented engineers go to software companies for compensation and location (incentives)
- Even mechanical, chemical, other engineers can leverage their education to learn how to become software engineers, data scientists, ML engineers, etc
- Many knowledge workers prefer to work remotely now which is rarer in industrials. Even if interested, they may not look for manufacturing jobs because they don’t expect that option
- Few industrial jobs are located in target cities (NYC, SF, DC, etc)
- Software startups have proven the ability to become unicorns. Far fewer industrial unicorns since the 90s.
Solutions space
- Partnerships
- Engineering groups <> startups
- AID network
- Job board?
- Retweeting job postings of members
- Inclusion in the newsletter
- Job fairs, virtual fairs, open house
Requirements
- finding talent to join the conversation
- ! This will be the hardest part of prepping for this conversation
- Would be helpful to know what their experience looking for work in this sector is like.
- Types:
- Students
- Transitioning to industrials
- Experienced in industrials
- finding engineering organizations with top tier talent who might have people interested in joining a startup
- Make specific asks of people to tell us any groups we should be aware of + later, get them to make an intro for us