- Employer Success Stories
Amazon has just started to develop a presence in the state of Michigan, and recently built a brand new fulfillment center in Brownstown Township. As a new employer in need of all new staff for the facility, they were struggling to obtain their needed workforce level utilizing their corporate recruiting strategies. They reached out to the Business Services Unit of the Michigan Works Southgate Service Center for assistance in identifying solutions to their hiring challenges.
Michigan Works! Business Services Reps met with Amazon’s Senior Staffing Coordinator, Chris Griffin, to get a better understanding of this new facility and the issues they were facing in trying to staff the operation. Their primary concerns were their ability to find a viable, qualified “audience” of interested job seekers, along with the level of turnover they were seeing in the first months of operation.
Our Business Services Team was able to identify some of the factors affecting Amazon’s success. The team worked with Amazon to identify the necessary traits for their Sorter Position. Michigan Works! also assisted Amazon in developing a localized recruitment strategy.
Michigan Works! then conducted mass outreach to those candidates through our Michigan Works! programs and resources, to drive candidates to Amazon’s online application. The team also scheduled weekly hiring events at the Southgate Center to centralize Amazon’s candidate processing and to maximize the advertising of the opportunity.
Implementing the strategy of locating qualified, local candidates who valued the opportunity to work for Amazon, and also lived close to the facility, the team was able to create a large pool of candidates for Amazon.
The project has been active for 90 days with over 780 hires so far, and an overall goal of surpassing 1,000 placements by January 1, 2017.
