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For many years, manufacturing has been staring down the barrel of a skills shortage, often relying on company closures and redundancies to replenish the workforce. It’s been the elephant in the room—quietly ignored—until the last 18 months brought it sharply into focus.
Questions Every Hiring Manager Should Ask
- Has the time it takes to hire significantly increased?
- Has the quality of freely available engineers declined?
- Are your job offers being rejected?
- Have you compromised on quality just to fill roles?
- Do you have a strategy for managing the skills you are losing through retirees?
The Real Challenge
By 2030 (4 years), 20% of maintenance engineers in the manufacturing sector will retire.
This loss of experience will create major knowledge gaps, with more than 50% of deep technical expertise retiring.
The shortage will hit hardest among engineers with 5–10 years of post-apprenticeship experience and leadership roles.
With only35% of apprenticeships completed each year, the current replenishment level is unsustainable. On average, there are 550 vacancies per newly qualified apprentice (source: Apprenticeship Gap Report).
Competition for talent is intensifying—especially from emerging sectors such as data centers and controls automation.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Run a simple calculation in your organisation, and the risks become clear. They will affect:
- Long-term business sustainability
- Reliability, production uptime, and profitability
- Employer reputation (once a company gains a poor reputation, engineers often won’t consider them again)
For too long, this issue has been kicked down the road. It must now be treated as seriously as a power outage or supply chain failure.
Calculate Your Problem
Start with simple maths:
Future retirement turnover + average annual department turnover – apprentice retention = total vacancy risk
Do this by grade or position.
Next, multiply that by the average time from vacancy sign-off to successful hire—now often 2–3 months instead of one. If you have 4 vacancies a year, that’s potentially a year to fill them. Alternatively, that’s 12 months of being short-staffed, this kind of slide starts slowly and gains significant momentum as the requirements increase.
Dig Deeper – Work Out Your Ratios
- Applicants to interviews
- Interviews to offers
- Offers to accepted hires
Example: 5 applicants per interview, 4 interviews per offer, and 2 offers per successful hire. You may need 40 applicants to secure just one hire.
Add to this the fact that 70% of candidates will consider counter offers, and top engineers often have 2–3 competing offers. It’s clear this process needs careful candidate management from first contact to first day at work.
The True Hiring Cost to Business
Few companies monitor the real cost of hiring, often focusing only on agency fees. But the biggest cost is operational impact.
An interview cycle can take 2–3 hours per candidate. Interviewing 4 candidates could mean 2 to 3 people contributing 12 working hours. A new employee typically reaches full productivity after 3 months. Add in a 12-week recruitment cycle, and you face 6 months without a fully operational team.
During that time, equipment reliability, production availability, and customer delivery performance often suffer. Those 6 months can significantly affect profitability and how potential employees start to view a “possible struggling business”.
When you analyse these numbers, the true cost of hiring runs into tens of thousands of pounds. As a former Operations Manager for a multi-site business, I learned one key lesson:
You can buy your way out of a supply chain issue—but you can’t deliver profit or commitments without people in place.
Strategy Is Everything
After identifying your hiring risk and cost, the next step is to build a clear, unified strategy:
Ownership across departments: This is not just an HR issue—it affects the entire business. Directors, HR, Engineering Managers and Production Managers must collaborate. Avoid siloed management; shared ownership prevents future blame-shifting.
Assess what’s not working: If your current hiring routes aren’t delivering, change them. Many company recruitment PSLs are cost-focused, not quality-focused. Most quality engineers are already employed—great talent must be targeted and headhunted.
Improve the hiring experience: Turned-down offers aren’t always about money. The process—communication, feedback and interview efficiency—can make or break success. Excessive reliance on PSLs also restricts candidate access due to no-poach clauses, leaving you with “just happen to be available” talent instead of the “best in market”.
Adopt agile hiring practices: In a hyper-competitive market, your recruitment process must be built to attract, engage and secure the top talent fast. Not a shopping list
Hiring Beyond Skills: The perfect candidate rarely exists. The focus should be on transferable skills, willingness to learn and exposure to relevant systems. In a shrinking workforce, adaptability outweighs perfect experience. A common problem is not acting quickly enough, the problem grows and the need for perfect becomes your enemy. You end up in a constant “fear to hire” loop based on increasingly growing skills issues. The consequence eventually ends up in compromised hiring decisions based on “just get anyone in” desperation.
- Make Your Vacancy Real: When writing job descriptions, show authenticity:
- Talk about your equipment, site and technology
- Explain your approach to maintenance, PPM and H&S
- Highlight development opportunities, training and career progression
- Discuss challenges openly and share success stories
This is what attracts the engineers you currently struggle to reach.
What’s Next
Let’s talk. Tiro doesn’t use a “one-size-fits-all” approach. We tailor strategies that work for your business. Whether you need advice or hands-on hiring support, we can help.
Tiro’s key strength is our ability to assess the entire market and evaluate hiring risk. Every assignment we undertake is designed to help clients manage that risk effectively.
- We know your sector, and your competitors
- We don’t rely on “active and available” candidates – we map the talent pool, targeting the “best in industry” engineers
- We manage those engineers from first contact to the first day placement in your business
We provide clear, actionable advice on how to give your business a competitive edge in a skills-short environment. Hiring is becoming increasingly complex.
In a rapidly evolving landscape at Tiro we believe in moving our partners from a “pure transactional process” to a higher organizational, strategic and risk managed strategy level.
Our benchmark: send 3 highly skilled and motivated candidates to make 1 successful hire, this is the true advantage headhunting gives a business.
Do you have a PSL? (a batch of preferred recruitment agencies). We don’t replace your current partnerships, we complement them. Just as you diversify your supply chain for reliability, think of Tiro as your specialist solution when standard routes fall short.
Managing an Ageing Workforce? By 2030, 1 in 5 Maintenance Engineers will retire. At Tiro Associates we help companies manage this transition, retaining knowledge, transferring skills and adapting to employees’ changing needs. We’ve supported our clients with team restructuring, reduced hours and shift pattern adjustments to retain experienced staff while keeping operations stable. Acting early gives you a genuine competitive edge.
Ready to secure the talent your business needs?
As Tiro’s dedicated Manufacturing Division Manager. my experience in managing complex hiring solutions is second to none. My knowledge covers a broad range of Manufacturing sectors including Data Centre, Heavy Industrial, FMCG and Utilities.
Book a 30-minute Teams meeting to explore options—it’s a great opportunity to discuss how we can support your business and help you hire with confidence. Book a call HERE
