Two years ago I toured a food processing plant in Minnesota. The talent acquisition manager had been trying to fill 40 production roles for months. Despite hundreds of job postings, nothing was happening. So I asked a simple question: “Have you tried promoting your jobs in Spanish?”
She looked at me like I had suggested something strange. The idea had never occurred to her because she thought diverse hiring initiatives were another department’s job, not a legitimate sourcing strategy.
That perspective is costing manufacturers workers they desperately need right now.
The Numbers Most HR Leaders Don’t Know
In 2023, the Hispanic labor force reached 31.8 million workers. That’s 69% growth compared to 20 years earlier. The participation rate stands at 66.9%, more than five points above non-Hispanic workers.
This is not a niche population. It’s the fastest-growing worker group in the country, and it’s heavily concentrated in exactly the occupations manufacturers need most: production, skilled trades, food processing, logistics.
Meanwhile, the Manufacturing Institute projects 2.1 million unfilled manufacturing roles by 2030. Those two data points should be connected in every HR director’s mind. They usually aren’t.
Why Outreach Fails Before It Starts
The most common mistake I see is treating Hispanic outreach as a DEI initiative rather than a sourcing strategy. When it’s filed under compliance, it gets deprioritized. When it’s treated as a talent acquisition channel, it gets resourced.
Some leaders worry about legal risk. That concern is misplaced. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission prohibits discrimination, but targeted outreach that expands the candidate pool is entirely lawful. You’re not excluding anyone. You’re reaching candidates who weren’t being reached before.
The other failure is assuming that posting on Spanish-language job boards is enough. It isn’t. Language is one barrier. But the bigger barriers are practical ones: workers don’t know what the job actually looks like, don’t have reliable transportation to remote plant locations, and don’t have local connections who can help them navigate a new community.
What Actually Works
The manufacturers who are solving this problem aren’t just translating their Indeed posting. They’re doing community-based outreach through churches and cultural organizations. They’re building relationships with Spanish-language radio stations in high-unemployment regions. They’re creating onboarding materials and supervisor training that accounts for language and cultural differences.
And the ones who are most serious about solving the labor shortage are going a step further: they’re recruiting Hispanic workers from regions where unemployment is high and relocating them to their facilities with structured housing, transportation, and community support.
A worker who has relocated to be near your plant, supported by their community and employer, is not the same hiring risk as a local temp worker who can leave for any other employer tomorrow.
The Question Worth Asking
If the local market isn’t producing the workers your plant needs, the logical next question is: where are those workers, and how do we reach them?
For many manufacturers, the answer is closer than they think. It just requires looking in different places and communicating in different ways.
Ariel Diaz is CEO and Founder of TalentMovers, a domestic workforce mobility company specializing in manufacturing and food processing. talentmovers.com
