Does the food industry have a workable H.R. plan?

Hiring in the food industry seems to suffer from a curious paradox. Want somebody to work on the line? Too often, the main requirement is a pulse. Secondarily and hopefully, the company doctor will find no drug residue during the mandatory test. Want someone in the front office? Well, let’s try to drag that one out as long as possible with checks, double-checks, deep background checks and a lot of hand-wringing. Let the big buck managerial talent wait until he or she gets frustrated and accepts a position with academia.

Here’s the bottom line on that hiring phenomena. To often, the food industry opens its employment department’s revolving door and places poorly-trained, minimum wage labor in positions that allow them to handle every product that leaves the building. Such niceties like how to operate that fancy touch screen controller on the high tech cooker and exactly what the company means when it says food safety goes out with the wash.

Training in most organizations is best described as “lip service.” Hey, I’ve seen it. Bringing in a 19 year old Latino or a woman who just arrived from Slovenia, either of whom barely understand English, and making them watch a 30 minute video IN ENGLISH does not qualify as adequate training.

Meanwhile, that marketing wizard from Yale and the production guru with 20 years of experience is subjected to an agonizing forced march through the recruiting mill. The company thinks long and hard before hiring an exec who commands a near six figure income, even if he or she has the ability to earn it back quickly and in spades, to boot. Meanwhile, new clerks have to pass muster on matters of education and personal background even if their major function is nothing more than pushing paper.

Here’s the fatal flaw. The new guy on the production line with the 30 minute training tape under his belt can cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in downtime in his first month on the job. If he really screws the pooch with provably bad product and the legal profession comes knocking on the corporate door, we’re talking millions.

Does it make sense that if your new employee is just touching paper, he or she is subjected to a very careful background check and maybe a week or two of closely monitored training and the people who actually handle your product and your good name get a 30 minute video before they’re thrown to the wolves?

Of course it doesn’t! It’s an insane way to run a business.

Now before I start getting indignant cards and letters and threatening emails, let me say I know quite a few companies that do an outstanding job at hiring, training and keeping employees from the greenest beginner to the highest paid cowboy in the ivory tower. There’s a name for those kinds of companies: “Profitable.”

Unfortunately, I also know too many companies that view their employees as imminently replaceable, nameless cogs. There’s a phrase for those kinds of companies: “Miserable places to work.”

So if your company has a marvelous H.R. program worthy of national bragging rights, please write and tell me about it. Give me the details and I’ll do two things that will help everyone. (1) I’ll write about it in my next IHobnob column and (2) I’ll send the details directly to a few of those companies that desperately need help. My email address is crjolley@msn.com.