HII shipyards, like Newport News Shipbuilding shown here during construction of the aircraft carrier, John F Kennedy , need experienced workers. (Janes/Michael Fabey)
HII is focusing more on hiring experienced workers than a “green” or inexperienced set of potential employees, according to company officials.
“While we're on our hiring plan for the year, we're actually repositioning our strategy relative to hiring where we're reducing our reliance on green labour,” Chris Kastner, HII president and CEO told investment analysts on 31 October during a quarterly earnings call.
“We're just going to hire less,” Kastner said. “We're going to focus on more experienced labour because we're just out of alignment or out of balance from an experience level right now, which leads to rework, which leads to inefficiency. And it's not good for anyone. We're repositioning that a bit, which I don't consider that is slowing down.”
Also, Kastner noted, “We haven't seen market improvement in attrition. That's why we're kind of repositioning the way we're hiring and focusing on less entry-level and more experienced labour because they tend to stay.”
Kastner pointed out, “It doesn't do anyone any good to have to meet your hiring plan and then not have supply-chain material there, right? We have to be very disciplined in how we do that. We have to be really disciplined in how we put these ships under contract as well. We can't sign a contract and hope. We have [the resources] to do that.”
HII must understand “the current macroeconomic environment”, he said, adding that it includes an “understanding of proficiency of our labour force, the fragility of the supply chain, potential for increased inflation, and all of the work that's happening within the shipyard”.
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