It’s the start of a new year, but many of the same challenges that plagued equipment dealers last year came over as swiftly, and unwelcomed, as a snowdrift on a blustery Sunday along I-65.

During the Precision Farming Dealer Summit in Louisville, Ky., last week, many of the classroom sessions and roundtable discussions focused on the issue of recruiting qualified employees. No surprise. This struggle continues to be very real. Good help — especially with equipment dealerships looking for service technicians and precision specialists who can meet the needs of the dealer and its customer base — is truly hard to find. What helps? Processes for people finding.

During the event, I was reminded that recruitment was also in focus at the Farm Equipment Manufacturers Assn. (FEMA) most recent conference. There, Chris Czarnik’s general session presentation during FEMA’s 2024 Marketing & Distribution Convention, “Revolutionizing Talent in the Modern Workforce,” caught the interest of our own Mike Lessiter, Editor/Publisher of Farm Equipment and Precision Farming Dealer. He spoke with Czarnik after and has since shared that insight, which — as I often say to my grown and flown children — is too good not to share.

I’m a stickler about ensuring my sources are top notch. This one leaves no doubt. Czarnik is an author, speaker and instructor who helps organizations recruit, retain and develop talent to help grow the next generation of leaders. For 16 years, he’s been the CEO of Career [RE]Search Group. CRG is a training organization focused on training job seekers, hiring professionals, including sales professionals.

“I’ve spent the last 20 years figuring out why people go to and leave organizations. I teach organizations in manufacturing, construction, and agriculture, how to recruit, retain and develop talent,” says Czarnik. The story of his work definitely reflects his passion for people-hunting, and offers valuable insight for those looking to fill service tech and precision specialist roles in 2025 and beyond. He explains that he has been involved with approximately 8,000 job searches in his life. In explaining his role during a presentation, he says that his role was to give people different ideas and tools that they can start using tomorrow to better recruit, retain and develop talent in their organization.

“If you're fishing for talent, I just spent 17 years with the fish you're trying to catch,” says Czarnik. When asked to expand on the fishing analogy, Czarnik spoke about the troubles people often bring his way about their struggle with finding the right fit. Here’s how he explains it.

Bring the Right Bait to Lure the Right Talent

“When people come to me and they say, ‘Hey, Chris, we're not getting any applicants or we're getting the wrong applicants,’ I always think about fishing. Think about this for a second. If you went fishing and you didn't catch any fish and you walked around blaming the fish, people would laugh at you, right? If you went fishing for trout, and you kept catching perch and you walked around blaming the fish for the wrong fish biting, people would laugh at you. It's very similar when you're talking about selling a product or service,” says Czarnik.

He continues, “If your salesperson came to you and said, ‘Hey, we brought you all these leads,’ and you said, ‘Well, none of these leads are good leads for us, they're not appropriate for our products and services,’ well, we wouldn't blame the potential customers. We would say that that salesperson was fishing with the wrong bait in the wrong lake, at the wrong depth, at the wrong time of day, at the wrong time of the year. So if you're not getting the kind of response that you want from your job ad — if you're not getting any applicants, or you're getting the wrong applicants, it's probably not the applicant's fault. The problem is you probably have the wrong lure in the wrong lake at the wrong time of day. However, we have 100% control of changing that if we do exactly the same thing to sell our job as we do to sell our products and services in a competitive market.”

Relating this to customers, he adds that organizations never complain about competing for customers. He says in part, “It’s the capitalist way. We know that's the price of doing business. We know that we have to compete with all the other vendors that have similar products and services. But all of a sudden, because we've had it our way for a long time … I mean, let's face it, for 40 years, we posted a job ad, a line formed, and we got to choose — it's not exactly competitive recruiting. We had it our way. I joke all the time that you can't call yourself a good fisherman if the fish jump in the boat for you. That's where we've been for the last 40 years,” explains Czarnik.

For him, it’s a matter of using existing capabilities and pivoting to shore up the recruitment effort. “If you think about the fact that we compete for customers … you use all the same ideas, tools and abilities to get new customers and then you use that to get new employees … I promise you're already good at what I'm teaching you to do. You just have to take all of your sales and marketing techniques and move them over into recruiting, because selling a job is no different than selling a product or a service,” adds Czarnik enthusiastically.

Bottom line time. What does he say is most important? If you invite your sales and marketing people into recruiting talent, you're halfway home.

Czarnik clearly is doing work he loves and is eager to share resources to make the job of finding folks to do jobs easier. He’s available at www.chrisczarnik.com, a site that offers videos, templates of things to do, and includes how to secure a copy of his book, Winning the War for Talent. It’s described as a guidebook that tells HR exactly how to move from being farmers of talent into hunters of talent. Using a process-oriented system, it will allow any organization to build models, marketing and initiatives to fill their organization with great people.

Lessiter Media Career Center Leverages Industry Depth

As it turns out, while writing this piece, I learned a thing or two about a Lessiter Media initiative designed to help dealers and manufacturers meet their recruitment needs. As told to me by the program’s coordinator, Logan Fitch, the company’s Ag Division Career Center streamlines the recruitment process with qualified and interested talent through multi-media postings on Lessiter Media’s 6 Ag Division websites.

The idea behind this all-new multimedia presence is to empower employers to effortlessly post job openings and connect with a highly qualified universe to tap talent, leveraging the Ag Division’s 55-year history with and reach in the farm machinery and grower industries. I’m always eager to share resources with our readers, so consider Logan (lfitch@lesspub.com) just that.

So whether you’re ice fishing this winter or hunkered down prepping bait to lure the next team of precision specialists and shop repair technicians, here’s hoping you’ll trust the process and have your own hiring success stories to tell by spring.