how do factories find people/employees for such utterly/ridiculously specific jobs, like if you watch videos on YouTube where they show factories of popular brands, and interview employees there, you will see people with such a strange specifications/jobs
In: 69
They don’t.
They hire people looking to “get in on the ground floor” and “learn new skills on the job”.
People train after being hired.
I’m a software developer. At this point maybe 10% or less of what I do is what I learned from college. What makes me valuable right now is what I’ve learned from working at my company for a few years and all of the very specific knowledge about its internal processes.
My college couldn’t teach me that because some of it’s considered confidential by the company. So when I was hired, it was based on more general things I could do and the assumption that I could learn the specifics of the company very fast.
That’s how most “skilled” jobs are. There are some basic skills needed that you can learn outside of the job, but most of what you need to know has to be taught after you’re hired. A lot of people scoff at factory work being “skilled”, but most of them would be maimed in a horrible accident if they tried it without training.
Either the job in question is a small subset of more common area of expertise, or it is simple enough that you learn the ropes as you start, or it is specific, but the industry is big enough that there are courses in universities on it.
One example – wineries. Been to sparkling wine winery recently. They have:
– a bunch of positions that require higher education in more generic food industry and in winemaking specifically – and local university teaches those.
– a couple extremely specific jobs – cleaning wine barrels from inside, handling bottles as wine matures, etc. They just hire people with no prior experience and teach them.
Train people. Even if the job is kind of specific there are still broader skills from other jobs, other factories that suggest aptitude for the job. Think of it as driving a Ford truck but getting hired to drive a Chevy truck. Sure there might be some differences, but you understand the big picture and can learn the differences, details rather quickly.
On top of what other people have mentioned, sometimes companies create super specific or unique jobs around employees they already have that have those skills, either as a promotion or as a response to a changing market.
Say you have a company that sells tennis shoes. Say you have a sales rep who has been at the company for 15 years. Great rep, has leaned the industry inside and out. Maybe you want to be able to give him a promotion and management role, but there aren’t any open. Well, you’re thinking about branching out in to golf shoes, you don’t want to lose this great guy to a competitor, and he loves golf, so you make a position called “Senior VP of Golf Shoe Sales and Marketing”.
Or you’re in the wine sales industry chugging along. One day, frozen wine slushies become the new big thing. Companies are spinning up departments to sell them. Luckily you have a guy that has been making wine slushies for years, knows all about them, and you can capitalize on that so you make him “VP of Wine Slushies for North America” or something.
Or sometimes you have a potential candidate for a job come along that you think would be awesome for the company, but you really don’t have a great job for them. They have a ton of experience in lots of fields, they would be a great hire, just not for the role you’re looking for. So you create some random job specifically tailored for them “Director of Trade Shows, Market Research, and Modeling” or something. Not a job that would usually exist within your company, and if it did it would probably be split between 2 or 3 departments, but because this one person has all of those skills and experiences, you roll it all into one position for them to handle.
I might be pretty biased, but being overly specific gives a variety of reasons to deny an applicant. Most likely if they are hiring someone it’s a broad connection to the responsibilities in past roles held by the one they select for the role.
Especially in the case of roles that requires all positions to be posted externally, even though an ideal internal candidate has been basically decided on.
It’s all training. I’m an operational deployment manager. My predecessor created the job and trained me and without my prior jobs knowledge I wouldn’t be able to do what I do (deploying new technology to my old peer group) I am 1 of 1 in my job. No one else in the world does EXACTLY what I do.
It wasn’t a factory job, but as others have said sometimes it’s a job posting for a very broad field that you get trained for a very specific niche in.
It happened to me twice when I was doing drafting.
I interviewed for a job and they said “This is based in CAD but it’s a really hyper-specific job. We’ll train you, but you have to be a good drafter to start.” They closed their doors less than a year later, but it was fun and it wasn’t any sort of normal drafting whatsoever. I was doing those stocking drawings for grocery stores where it told you how many faces of canned goods went here and boxes of this went there.
Second time was my very next job after that. They trained me to do design work that only a few people in the US were doing. Worked there briefly because they didn’t pay you like you had a special skill. Don’t tell me I’m in a special job and pay me like McDonald’s. I’m not here for bragging rights.
Sometimes job descriptions are really specific because they want to hire internally. Or sometimes someone works in a more general position and slowly transitions to the more specific role.
Desperate people will take any job. I once found a “factory work” job where my job was to pick the price labels of old dvds so they could be re-sold. I wish I was kidding! To say it was mundane and boring would be an understatement. But it paid the bills (just about!)
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