Updated on 26 January 2021
In this article, read about:
- The Value of a Good Job Description
- Qualities of a Good Trainer
- Experience
- Enthusiastic educator
- Specialization
- How to Recruit Your Ideal Trainer
- Funnels and screen
- Smart screening
- Contract
- How to Write a Job Description
The Value of a Good Job Description
One unexpected responsibility you may have as a warehouse manager or warehouse trainer is writing job descriptions to help HR or an external staffing agency recruit new talent for your warehouse workforce. Although recruitment and hiring processes were strictly handled by those roles in the past, modern warehouse management relies on input from the managers who will supervise the new hires to create the best possible job advertisement.
While it may seem like this task is not relevant to your responsibilities, working with the hiring personnel to write an accurate job description is crucial. Hiring the right person for the job prevents high turnover by improving the chances that the person hired is a good fit for the role. It also saves time, money, and resources from being wasted on a new hire that will soon quit. Especially during the peak shipping season when you are likely to onboard 80 to 100 temporary warehouse workers to keep up with demand, hiring the right person from the start is vital.
If your warehouse does not have an established, well-trained team of warehouse trainers, the many problems linked to bad recruitment, hiring, and training processes — and the resulting high turnover — will be a costly and time-consuming problem that you will have to manage.
Knowledge and productivity loss, normal seasonal churn, and wasted resources hurt your warehouse’s performance and profits. Hiring an effective warehouse trainer or a warehouse training team requires some planning. The benefit is that once you have a top-talent trainer in place, the job advertisement and training responsibilities will no longer fall to you. For this reason, your first priority is recruiting an excellent warehouse trainer.
Qualities of a Good Trainer
Regardless of whether you have ever worked in HR or written a job description before, the world of recruitment has become just as complex and competitive as warehousing, distribution, and logistics. To create the ideal job advertisement there are a few key considerations:
- Experience: Good trainers are hard to find. Especially, when a warehousing company needs them to be both — a ‘floor presence’ and an experienced, technically savvy leader with in-depth industry knowledge about warehouse associates’ various responsibilities and training needs. This is a role where seniority is crucial to a good outcome.
- Enthusiastic educator: Top training leaders are passionate teachers.
- Specialization: Great credentials for university and college are important, but what warehouses and distribution centers need most are trainers with specialized certifications in the science, development, and application of warehouse training best practices.
How to Recruit Your Ideal Trainer
- Funnels & channels: In terms of placing the job advertisement, it is important to look internally. This will create a culture where employees feel that they have a clear career path with the company. If you have to search externally, reach out to industry networks to find reputable training managers with warehouse training or logistics experience. As a last resort, you can give a description of your needs to a trusted agency or headhunter before posting the position to the common job boards and employment websites.
- Smart screening: Writing a clear job description saves you and the applicant time and energy. Invest in smart software that keeps track of applicant submission frequency, the source of the CV or resume, and whether it had a high score based on target words or other descriptors.
- Contract: State expectations clearly and upfront. Many warehouse positions have responsibilities that involve more than one department. If this is the case for your warehouse’s trainer position, make that obvious in the job description. Be transparent and fair when advertising and negotiating the pay scale. Different skills and levels of experience demand different salaries and benefits packages. Being honest about the pay early on and explaining the reasoning behind it will ease negotiations and create manageable expectations.
Finally, only hire a trainer you strongly believe is the best fit for your warehouse. A trainer that is a poor fit could leave quickly, forcing your warehouse to quickly search for a replacement. If the trainer is especially unhappy with their experience, they may damage the warehouse’s reputation through negative reviews on sites like glassdoor.com. An even worse outcome is that a trainer who is not a good fit stays on long-term and provides inadequate training to your entire workforce.
How to Write a Job Description
Until you have found your perfect fit for the training manager role, you may still have to oversee the recruitment, hiring, and training processes yourself. By considering what qualities and skills the position requires, and talking about that honestly in the job advertisement, you are more likely to find the right person for the role.
You should ask yourself:
- If it is better to hire someone internally or externally for the position?
- What level of experience does the job call for?
- What kind of attitude the person should have to best fit in with the rest of the team?
It is better for you to answer these questions based on your expertise and experience supervising people in this role. Otherwise, an administrator who is unfamiliar with the details may have to guess what you are looking for and you will suffer the consequences.
While it is great that the internet has opened the door for more top talent to be ‘seen’ by a hiring firm, many are using SEO and other keyword algorithms to screen out candidates. It is simply unrealistic to comb through 10,000 resumes and CVs from Indeed, LinkedIn, and other sites. To attract the right applicants, write a job description that is narrow in scope. Be crystal clear on what the ‘must-haves’ are vs. what skills or qualities are a bonus.
The template below is a great starting place for creating an accurate and transparent job description. Writing a job description for your warehouse might seem like a task better suited for HR. However, as the warehouse manager, you know better than anyone what you are looking for in an applicant. You can save your warehouse and yourself time and energy by using your experience to make sure the details are perfect and find the right fit for your warehouse.