RECRUITING A NEW GENERATION OF TOP TALENT, AN INTERVIEW WITH ANTHONY HINTON
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With the current labour shortage, MHIRJ is taking steps to help accelerate the training of skilled technicians. Our very own Stephanie Bento, Senior Brand Manager, sat down with Anthony Hinton, Head of our Service Centre Network, to talk about the steps we're taking to bring great new talent on board.
Stephanie Bento: Recruiting skilled technicians continues to be a huge topic in the aviation industry, especially post-COVID. So, here to talk to us about that is Anthony Hinton, Head of our Service Centre Network. Anthony, thank you for being here today.
Anthony Hinton: Thank you, it’s a pleasure.
Stephanie Bento: We’ve grown our service network considerably, talk to us about what your team is doing to accelerate the recruitment and training of skilled technicians.
Anthony Hinton: So, recruitment certainly has changed post-COVID, it’s a multi-faceted issue. We use the conventional, we use social media to a large degree to make sure that we’re reaching the target audience. We’re also engaged with the community colleges in all 3 states around our centres to make sure that we’re engaged with the AMP programs and recruiting them. We’re actually at the point now where we’re giving tours to middle school students. We invite them in and take them to the hangar and try to spark an interest within the aviation industry as a whole.
Stephanie Bento: Talk to us about the apprenticeship program. How does that work?
Anthony Hinton: A phenomenal program, been in existence for a few years. It allows us to bring somebody with no experience within aviation at all into our facility. We test them to make sure that they’re mechanically inclined. We bring them in and over a three-year period they are able to obtain the training requirements and the hands-on training requirements to allow them to set and test for their AMP. We tend to find that someone who goes through the apprenticeship program stays with us long-term.
Stephanie Bento: So, what is it like in the service centres? How would you describe the team that you’re building?
Anthony Hinton: There’s commitment to the community, there’s commitment to the team, teamwork before everything, and they’re all driven to provide a great service for our customers. We still try to very much keep that family feel about the operations.
Stephanie Bento: Some of our technicians have been with us for many years so that must just speak volumes of the team that you’re building, the dedication to the trade. Talk to us a little bit about that.
Anthony Hinton: We’re very fortunate. We have some technicians that have 40-plus years of service with us. Again, we want this to be a generational organization. At the end of the day, it’s truly our technicians that make us successful. Without them, certainly, our business would not exist and from a technician point of view, without the technicians the aviation industry doesn’t exist. So, they truly are the cornerstone of everything we do.
Stephanie Bento: Absolutely, I couldn’t have said it better. Thank you so much for your time, I appreciate it.
Anthony Hinton: Thank you!
There’s commitment to the community, there’s commitment to the team, teamwork before everything, and they’re all driven to provide a great service for our customers. We still try to very much keep that family feel about the operations.
Anthony Hinton
