Episode #62: The Battery Belt Talent Crunch: Recruiting Leaders to Launch America’s EV Gigafactories
Host Matt Horine discusses the “Battery Belt,” where eight states from Michigan to Georgia have attracted over $250B in announced EV and battery investments, and argues the key constraint isn’t permitting or supply chains but experienced people—engineers, operations leaders, and technical executives—to run new greenfield facilities. Guest Michael Chambers of the Chambers Group explains his APEX recruiting process using scientific job profiling and psychometric matching, including benchmarking hiring managers, candidate videos, a 99% one-year retention rate (96% to two years), and a two-year replacement guarantee. They describe intense regional competition for scarce roles (high-voltage, calibration, controls/automation, battery cell engineers, and greenfield plant managers), relocation resistance, and the need for internal academies and partnerships with community colleges. Chambers details how stale salary bands and delayed market data cause missed hires and plant-launch delays, urging early pipeline building and creative offers via clear career pathways and upskilling.
Links
- Michael Chambers on LinkedIn
- The Chambers Group on LinkedIn
- The Chambers Group Website
- Veryable Is Revitalizing U.S. Manufacturing
- Sign Up on the Veryable Platform
Timestamps
- 00:00 Podcast Welcome
- 00:44 Battery Belt Boom
- 01:36 Meet Michael Chambers
- 03:47 APEX Hiring Process
- 05:55 What Is Battery Belt
- 08:10 Why It Matters
- 09:17 Talent Market Reality
- 12:12 Hardest Roles To Fill
- 15:08 Stale Salary Bands
- 19:33 Greenfield Leadership Gap
- 23:12 Hiring Timeline Playbook
- 26:13 Next 18 Months Signals
- 28:37 How To Connect
- 30:10 Wrap Up And Subscribe
Episode Transcript
Matt Horine: [00:00:00] Welcome to US Manufacturing Today, the podcast powered by Veryable, where we talk with the leaders, innovators, and change makers, shaping the future of American industry, along with providing regular updates on the state of manufacturing, the changing landscape policies and more.
Over the last four years, eight states stretching from Michigan through Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and into Georgia have absorbed more than $250 billion in announced EV and battery manufacturing investment. It's often referred to as the Battery Belt. Gigafactories the size of [00:01:00] 13 football fields, communities that watched manufacturing leave for 20 years are now watching it come back.
A real concrete attempt to rebuild the American industrial base in a sector that China currently controls from raw materials all the way through finished battery cells. That is a capital story, and the capital story is real, but there is a constraint underneath that almost no one is talking about publicly, and it is the thing that will actually determine which of these projects delivers and which ones slip through the cracks.
It's not permitting, it's not supply chain, it is people, specifically the engineers, operations leaders, and technical executives who have the experience to run these facilities, and right now there are not enough of them. My guest today, Michael Chambers, has built his entire firm around solving this problem.
The Chambers Group does one thing, executive search and engineering recruitment exclusively for Battery Belt advanced manufacturers in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee. EV and battery technology, silicon carbide, semiconductors, aerospace and defense, and industrial automation. Michael recently wrote about why stale 2024 salary bans are actively delaying [00:02:00] 2027 plant launch windows, and that's a conversation we're gonna bring up today on US Manufacturing Today.
Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael Chambers: Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.
Matt Horine: We're very excited to have you, and I'll have to admit, I don't know if I had heard the phrase Battery Belt, which you caught my attention through having that in your headline, and we'll give credit where it's due. That's the first place I heard it from.
So as far as it's concerned here, that one's all yours. But what led you to launch the Chambers Group and develop this process specifically focused on the sector?
Michael Chambers: I was born in Georgia, kinda grew up in North Carolina. Before I moved back here, I was out in Seattle doing recruitment for AI engineers in the medical technology space.
I wanted to move back to North Carolina to be closer to family, a lot of friends here. So I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. There was so much news around manufacturing. I hadn't heard the term Battery Belt at all. I just knew that there was all this investment coming in and nothing had really happened yet.
So when I moved, I [00:03:00] decided I was gonna start focusing on this, doing a little bit more research. And I had a lot of friends that had worked in manufacturing, so I decided that this was gonna be the best way to go. Always been into automotive stuff, cars and stuff like that. EVs I see as being the future of something, clean energy.
And plus, with all the investments coming in, I was like, "This seems like a no-brainer." So much coming online at once, that's gonna be talent constraints and things like that. So that's where the idea was born, and I just went for it.
Matt Horine: A lot of it flows to the market. And when we met, we talked a little bit about the EV space, and we'll get into some of those stats on the show.
But it's certainly something that provides a unique opportunity for the country to reindustrialize and build more manufacturing irregardless of preferences for what types of vehicles and those things. It's a major reindustrialization story. I think what we wanna get to, first and foremost, is that your process is really unique, and I, I did a little reading on it.
It's called the APEX process. It's built on scientific job profiling rather than job descriptions, and it [00:04:00] produces a 96% retention rate from what I read. Tell us a little bit about your process and what kinda differentiates you in the market.
Michael Chambers: Yeah, so a few things. That process really sets us apart. A lot of internal recruiting and external recruiters like me, they do a lot of psychometric assessments, but what sets us apart, we do it a little bit differently.
I don't just analyze the possible candidates or resumes that are coming in. We also benchmark and assess the hiring manager, and if they're available, someone that's working in that plant that's doing that job the way they want, we also assess them. So then we build a full pipeline around that with full psychometric matching that my clients can see on their online portal they have with the Chambers Group.
They can see, and we have each candidate record videos of themselves so that they can actually see how they're interacting on camera, problems that they've solved. I wanna give my clients that I work with a full picture of the people that I can have in a pipeline for them, so [00:05:00] that's one of the best ways to do it, and that's why we have...
Actually, we have a 99% retention rate for a year, and then up to two years is 96%. And then the other thing some recruiting friends of mine say I'm crazy, maybe I am, we offer a two-year replacement guarantee if somebody doesn't make it two years. A lot of firms, usually a few months, or at most I've seen a year.
I'm so sure that this is gonna work that I'm willing to replace them in two years if it doesn't work out.
Matt Horine: Yeah, that's an incredible stat and something pretty unique in the marketplace. I think for manufacturers specifically, somebody who stands by their process that well, it probably resonates. So really, really great way to, to make a different approach and differentiate.
And you hear a lot these days about the The interview process, the job market, all those things. Bringing everyone's whole self to the interview makes a lot of sense to me, and any unique and way that they can differentiate, whether it's through video, having those types of assessments really stand out.
So pivoting a little bit and maybe backing up, we mentioned it in [00:06:00] the intro, the Battery Belt, what it actually is. And for listeners who heard the term or maybe not, they don't have the full picture, what is the Battery Belt? How did it form? And what's actually being built there right now?
Michael Chambers: It's formed because of all of this investments.
I think the number is something crazy, almost like 50% of new battery and EV investments are happening in the southeast and in the Battery Belt right now. These are not old plants being repurposed. These are net new greenfield plants being brought up from zero to full production. So that's something that manufacturing in this area hasn't seen in a while.
You look at North Carolina, they had a huge textile industry, and that, that's gone at this point. Some of it still exists. This is where the major investment is happening, and so many of these plants are coming online all at once within months of each other. So you're looking at all these plants that do similar things.
There's a lot of crossover here, plus the tier two [00:07:00] and tier three plants that are supplying some of someone like Toyota Battery, which Toyota Battery is crazy. It is the largest battery plant that Toyota has, not just in the US, but globally. So the amount of investment that's coming in just with that one plant, and then the other plants that are gonna be supplying that around in the area, you're looking at a lot of competition for talent, specifically in this region, and that's the Battery Belt.
And it's just, it's not going away. We've all seen plants get nervous about tariffs and stuff. To my knowledge and from what I've seen, I've only seen one plant really pump the brakes and stop construction on their plant. But from what I've heard from people, that they probably in the next few months, that they'll resume building.
Matt Horine: That's great news 'cause I think a lot of the reindustrialization conversation centers around capital allocation and capital being committed, which it's actually manifesting in the southeast in new industries, which is part of that reindustrialization message. It's not just reanimating and ring- bringing back to life [00:08:00] plants and industries, which there's a he- heavy- heavily vested interest in textiles, but it needs this complimentary support where the economy becomes a little bit more diverse, so pretty exciting prospect.
Beyond the jobs numbers, what does the Battery Belt represent for American manufacturing strategically, and why does it matter so much that we get this right?
Michael Chambers: Energy security, obviously, that's a big one As far as workforce are concerned, skills that will bring the US into the future. We're not just looking back at other things.
And then another big one, I talk about this a lot of times, national security, rare earth magnets, critical minerals, all that sort of thing. We've been outpaced by China, and we need to start doing these things at home rather than going out, and we have the ability to do it. US is huge, and we have so much space to do these plants, and we have so much talent here.
The investments are there. We just need to put investments back into the workforce, so that way we are skilling people properly so that we can actually do what we need to do [00:09:00] here.
Matt Horine: No, that makes a lot of sense. I think the strategic importance of it is people often talk about reindustrialization, the era of globalization that was forty, fifty years in the past.
What does the next forty to fifty years look like? And so bringing that new technology and that new development makes sense to put the country on strategic footing for the next century. But beyond the jobs numbers a- and those types of things, what does it actually look like on the ground? You're inside the hiring conversations at multiple, we can call them Battery Belt companies, at the same time.
What does this talent market actually look like from your vantage point?
Michael Chambers: The talent market here is super competitive. You see a lot of challenges filling super specific engineering roles. On the workforce development side, keeping that at pace in order to continue to supply these places. One big issue with, specifically with the Southeast is I think the number is something like forty-one percent of people don't wanna relocate.
As, and some of these plants here, specifically in the Southeast, are in pretty remote areas, [00:10:00] so convincing somebody to move from California or move from Arizona to here, it-- that's a tough, that's a tough sell So really where the biggest upside is here is these companies building out these internal academies, working with local community colleges, local universities.
And from what I've seen in the Southeast, there's a lot of investment at the state level being done into workforce development. I don't see it too much of a struggle with places like Toyota Battery and some of these bigger tier one. They usually have the budget for it. But the other ones, the tier two and tier three suppliers, they're the ones that need the most as far as workforce development to build their own talent pipeline inside.
Some people think it's counterintuitive for a recruiter to make these recommendations 'cause that means that they might need me less. But another portion of what I do is consulting on the workforce side. I want people in this market, or people who have never been in EVs before, to know that there are resources out there to skill themselves.
[00:11:00] And the salary increases for any of these roles are just- they're going up every 12 months, and they're not going up by a little bit of it. I'm seeing, like, 18% in 12 months. Things are just accelerating quickly, and it's-- You have to have the right recruiting strategy internally, along with whoever you have as a talent partner, plus whatever resources you can do on the workforce development side.
That's gonna help you retain people, bring more people in, and that's really what this market Needs to see, and I would say that most of these companies are open to doing something different with their process.
Matt Horine: Yeah, that's a really good and encouraging thing to hear because a lot about what we talk about, especially in the manufacturing space, that wage rates have not kept pace with inflation, productivity enhancements, all of those things, and so it's nice to hear that the needle's moving on that in particular, which we always believed it could because people, the long arc of the manufacturing arbitrage over the last 30 to 40 years is that it was a labor arbitrage [00:12:00] to start with, and then as wage rates rose in countries where it would move to, it makes more economic sense to rebalance that in the United States.
But it has to be tangible. Like, people think that's the theory. You got to see it play out, so that's a really encouraging thing to hear. Because of the types of roles that you work with and the types of companies, which roles are hardest to fill right now and where's the gap the most acute in, in this kind of new greenfield area that you're in?
Michael Chambers: So I see a lot of high voltage technicians, calibration technicians, controls and automation engineers, battery cell engineers. Obviously, I've written a lot about this specifically, but plant managers that actually have greenfield experience, that talent profile is incredibly small and very difficult to get right.
I have a nightmare story from a plant that I worked with pretty recently about they felt like that they hired the perfect plant manager. He's a great guy. I've met him. Coincidentally, I helped place him in another plant because they ended up having to let him go. He didn't have [00:13:00] greenfield experience. He didn't have experience, a plant that didn't have anything set in place, no policies, no nothing.
He had great experience working with plants that were already operational, and they had to basically restart a search, and that cost them a lot. It costs, it costs you everything. I tell them all the time, it's not just if you have to hire a recruiter to find somebody, it's not just whatever the recruiter is charging.
You're getting cost in downtime, and people are just sitting idle, and you just, it- that timeline is already on a razor's edge, and when you have to keep pushing it back this way, it's just all of that has a compounding effect, and it's not good. And I see that frustration with a lot of these roles.
Sometimes they're getting it wrong, and then it's just does something to the people inside culturally. People are having to pick up extra, do more work, and I've seen in this area, it's a little bit different from the culture that I've seen on the other side of the coast, this sleep-in-the-factory culture, but here there's a lot of [00:14:00] work/life balance that people want.
They're all about talking about families. It has an effect on the business. And competitively, if you don't think that there are people inside your plant that are open to looking, this is the only time I've ever worked in recruiting where I pick up a phone to talk to somebody I think has a good profile and they're like, "Yeah, let me know if there's something out there.
I'm open to it." And I'm like, "Well, are you happy there?" And they're like, "Yeah, I'm happy." But do you know what, where things are at with wages, they know that they can-- there's like a premium being paid for these people. So I'm just-- I've been pleasantly surprised by how many people are happy to hear a recruiter, 'cause we don't always have the best reputation in the market.
So it's been good to see.
Matt Horine: Yeah, that is a good thing, and overall the dynamics of it probably do shift. You really touched on something there that the, like, the wrong hire or a delayed hiring process, the compounding effect and the urgency that is needed for this type of recruitment and this type of building a plant from, from [00:15:00] groundbreaking to, to ramp up is, is an intense process.
And when there's leadership missing, it puts a lot of investment in jeopardy. So really good to highlight that. Let's talk about the salary band problem, 'cause we touched on that earlier. Walk me through the mechanism. How does a stale comp band end up on the critical path of a plant launch?
Michael Chambers: Yeah. Number one, you're either gonna lose somebody who has been recruited away to a plant that's going to pay a premium, or, one, you're gonna get a bad reputation.
I've been on the phone with a lot of people, and they will call places out by name and say, "The salary that I was presented with was a joke, and they weren't willing to work with me on it." So you have that side of things, and then the other side of things is you've got people that are willing to pay this premium And it's a f- few different things are happening.
Whether some of these companies are working off of outdated data and they haven't... And some of these salary surveys, they take a while, so in order to get that information, as opposed to someone like me who's on the ground [00:16:00] knowing what people are paying, what people are willing to accept, and that's the conversations I've had to have with a few clients where I...
They either gonna like it or they're not gonna like it. I'm gonna tell them that you are 18% below what the market is paying, and if you want this absolutely perfect person, you might have to even go up above that. So whether it's me sitting down with people telling them, "You're gonna have to revise your budgets on what you can pay people, but if you want the best in the market, then this is what you're gonna have to pay."
And we're looking at things that sometimes where they're like 18 to 24 months behind of what things need to be. And they, these companies here, they need to be hyper-specific on salaries. You need to be looking at specifically geographically in this area. I don't really look outside of it, 'cause the people that are here, they're gonna stay here and they're not gonna have a problem finding a place to work.
I have... That has not been my experience.
Matt Horine: We've lived through the past couple of years. I... Starting with the [00:17:00] past couple decades, manufacturing wages has not risen in parity with productivity levels or growth. And then you look at the last couple of years, the inflation rate overall, some of those salary bands are a little bit stale.
It's not really addressing what people are used to in terms of making a living. And that's something that at Veryable we talk to people all the time about when they post ops. They're going off of a rate sheet that maybe they wrote 10 years ago, or they think it's like a $20 an hour equivalent op when it's actually much higher, and there are people who are building new greenfields, or they're building new things and they're getting hyper-competitive about that because of the level of investment.
Do you think the right benchmark data exists and companies aren't using it, or do you think it's genuinely that hard to find?
Michael Chambers: I think they're just having trouble finding it, or they don't have a good way to capture that data. I think that's another piece of it, or maybe they just can't afford it. Some of these plants, they don't understand how they couldn't afford it with the amount of investments.
But I have told plants before that I knew couldn't afford it, but I've told them that there are [00:18:00] ways around that. If you bring somebody in, and let's say that your salary is a little bit below the market, as long as you have a clear career pathway that's in place and you're willing to invest in their education on upskilling and really get them to the next level, people are willing to move for that, as long as they know that there's a company that's willing to invest in them.
The, I... It's not the end of the world if there's serious budget constraints. But- You have to get creative with how you're gonna bring those people in. You can't just be like, set the offer on the table and basically not be willing to budge on the number. If you can't budge on the number, there are other things that you can do, other things at your disposal, and that's part of training with your hiring teams and part of the reason why not just bringing in any recruiter that's just gonna throw CVs at you all the time.
You really need someone that understands the market, understands the data, and is in the market and specifically that market and kind of knows what things are, and that's where I come in. I mo- even more so than recruiting, [00:19:00] I'm giving people advice all the time on what I'm seeing in the market, and I'm happy to help anybody with that, and usually I'm not charging anything for it, which is sounds crazy, but it'll, it all comes back to you eventually.
Matt Horine: Yeah. That's a really good way to, to think about it, is if you are the expert, people will point back to it, and the need for real time data is pretty extreme right now. I think people have some of those stale roll RECs that they think they have a number for, but they haven't thought about a lot of the macro factors and even geographical factors where you're at.
You, you were mentioning earlier moving from one coast to the other. It's pretty dynamic, so it's something to definitely think about and engage on We talk a lot on our show about this perceived frontline workforce shortage, which I push back on as more of a question of labor access for the equivalent of what we call hourly worker or people who are doing operations work.
We don't think there's a shortage. We think it's an access issue and an ability to prove skillsets and work their way up. But I do believe there is certainly some shortage [00:20:00] in the type of folks who have launched a greenfield advanced manufacturing s- facility, the plant GMs, VP of operations who've lived through a startup.
How real is that talent gap right now? And I know you highlighted earlier maybe geographical location maybe might be a limiting factor, but what's the other limiting factor that you're really seeing?
Michael Chambers: I just think specifically if we're gonna talk the United States as a whole, it's been a while since we've really focused on bringing manufacturing back here, and specifically on the battery side and advanced manufacturing side, a lot of these older leadership, they-- some of these problems that come up, they're new.
It's new technology. It's new across the board. So peop- finding people that have that experience, and it's not just looking at somebody who's been a plant manager before. Look for someone who's been on the plant floor before that maybe wants to be promoted, and they have experience in that net new environment, and they understand some of the problems that come along with it.
You have to get creative with the recruiting, and [00:21:00] I don't think that there's, you know... Everyone is so used to getting a piece of paper, looking at a resume, and figuring out if they have experience in that role, and we need to move away from that and think about what specifically is the problem and start recruiting on the people that have solved that specific problem before.
And that's not the easiest thing to move away from, but that's where our psychometric assessments come in and understanding these are the skills and these are the, the psychology behind why these skills work for this role, and that's a big part of finding that perfect match that's... You don't wanna hire a plant manager, and he doesn't cut it And less than a year or five months later, that's not gonna work.
It's not gonna work for anybody, and it's gonna cost you money, and it's gonna cost you a lot of frustration. And I see it all the time. Sometimes it's, like, the same 20 or 30 names I see coming across my desk all the time about, "Hey, this is the guy that I want to run my plant," and they are [00:22:00] already somewhere where they're very happy.
And getting creative on how to bring those people in and making sure that whatever salary you have in mind is where the market needs to be. But these are skills that you have to really start... This is why a big part of what I talk about is developing the workforce that you have and developing the younger people that are coming up, because you really need these skills.
We do have a wave of retirement coming soon, and if you are not doing mentorship programs, if you're not doing apprenticeships, if you're not doing these things, you've got a l- a lot of institutional knowledge that's about to leave the workforce, and it- there's n- I talk to places all the time, even established ones, that there's no centralized data place for this.
So once that knowledge is gone, it's gone.
Matt Horine: Yeah. It's, uh, it... We're reaching critical mass on that right now with boomer retirements. You hear a lot about, like, in the S&B space, like, people selling their businesses, and that business just doesn't have a buyer, or it doesn't have somebody, like, if it's generational, doesn't [00:23:00] have that next generation.
It's a real problem, and you extrapolate that at scale for a very large manufacturing facility, it gets a little worse because people are expecting business as usual, and it may not be if you don't do that type of investment. So really great point. Our audience is generally operators, people running manufacturing facilities, making those types of workforce decisions right now.
Some are in that geographical area, and so I hate to be one of those folks that takes you up on your offer for free advice, but that's what we would, we would do here. What is your advice to a manufacturer who is maybe six months from needing that person and they haven't done much yet? They know they need somebody, but they haven't started putting anything solid around the role planning or a hiring decision.
Michael Chambers: On a good day, you're looking at 10 to 14 weeks, maybe 30 by the time you get through the offer phase. If you're thinking about it now, you're talking about people that are on vacation You get to the end, you've still got people, vacations before school. Trying to schedule interviews around things like that is always [00:24:00] a nightmare.
I typically dread this time of year with scheduling interviews because people are-- They're on vacation, and getting those, getting all the stars to align for you is like a nightmare. But you really need to start building that pipeline now, even if you don't do anything with it, to gauge interest. I bring on a search partner that's going to be out there at least talking to people in the marketplace, even if there's nothing available.
You have to build that pipeline and make sure that it's there, because as soon as it, as soon as you are desperately needing that person, they're never there. I see it all the time. I will have an inbox or my phone will be blowing up with people with X experience exactly when nobody is asking, and then as soon as somebody needs it, they're- they've all got jobs, they're all happy, and they don't wanna move anywhere, and then we have a lot of work to do.
But if you're, like, building that and you're keeping that list together, people know other people, and they're always happy to say, "Hey, you need to call my buddy. This is what he, this is what he [00:25:00] knows." You just need to think about what you're going to need and start building that pipeline immediately. And that's a-- I talk to people about that all the time.
I'm like, "Okay, so this is what you need now, and I'm happy to help you with that. But talk to me about what are you gonna need in a year? What are you gonna need in six months? So I can go ahead and start building what that profile is gonna look like and start casually talking to people in that marketplace about what salaries look like, what benefits look like, what all these things look like, so that we can have a clear picture of strategy."
A lot of that's not getting done. You, you hear b- that we need a process engineer. We need it yesterday. Go find it. And then you need something else in a couple weeks, and it's like you knew you were gonna need this a while ago, but you, you-- it just hasn't worked out. You have gotten-- resumes come in, and you're just not happy with any of them.
You have to be reaching that passive market. You have to be putting in the work in advance before you need these people [00:26:00]
Matt Horine: For sure. No, it's one of those things, there's never, like, a perfect alignment in the market, right? There's a bunch of people looking, these magical candidates that have the perfect resume for the perfect opening to fill, and I sh- I, I imagine it's getting more and more dynamic.
And with that, over the next 18 months, in this market specifically, what does it look like? What are the signals you're watching most closely for it to take root, for this to be some kind of permanent movement, especially around EVs, battery belt, that type of recruitment and moving, maybe making a career decision to, to join up with something in that space?
Michael Chambers: Yeah. I, I would just start now. Start looking at what those skills are. Start working. There's so many resources. I was just sitting in on a workforce development committee at App State. Community college leaders from all over the place, and they're talking about the programs they're trying to build, the programs that they wanna build for skilling.
So these things are everywhere. And I would say that Scout Motors is... I was at their grand opening of their training [00:27:00] center back in April. What they're doing on the workforce development side before that plant is even finished, because the training center is done, and talking to the VP of HR there, they're bringing on so many people that have no battery or even automotive experience at all They, I think they just fir- they just graduated their first class.
It takes 15 weeks to get people trained up on this stuff, and they're just like, "Come in and give us a shot," and they're willing to invest so much in that workforce, and that's what I'm talking to my clients about if they don't have it. You have to be willing to build those skills and bring those people in, 'cause there are people that wanna learn, there are people that wanna get into this, and even we have people that are, have worked in automotive manufacturing for a long time, and some of those skills translate to the EV side, but a lot of them don't.
If you're not, if the company you're with is not working with you to give you those skills, then they're doing you a disservice in a way. And they're, you either have to go out and find it yourself, or you have to [00:28:00] find a company that's going to invest in you. Because again, you don't wanna lose that knowledge somebody like that has, but they also need those skills to, that are gonna transfer and be able to help.
'Cause a regular manufacturing plant and a plant that has batteries, there are a lot of things that are, can go wrong, and a lot of different things that are happening there that aren't the same.
Matt Horine: For sure. I think there's a lot of themes here throughout the show, which is prior proper planning, right? And thinking strategically about the human capital element of the re-industrialization movement.
It's not just about capital and plants. It's great. It's awesome to see it go up. But how are people going to actually get in there and start operating? Where can our listeners go to find out more about you, about your process, potentially connect with you if they're in, they happen to be in the search?
Michael Chambers: My LinkedIn.
I almost never turn down a connection request, at least until LinkedIn tells me I can't anymore. The number that's up on my LinkedIn is my personal number. I might not answer it immediately, but I do return [00:29:00] phone calls. I do talk to people. Shoot me an email. Direct messages on LinkedIn are great, and chances are, if I have even a 15-minute opening in my schedule where there's nothing booked, I will hop on a call with you if you say, "Hey, I wanna pick your brain about X."
I will get on the phone and talk to anybody. I talk to established people. I talk to a lot of college kids that haven't even graduated yet. I love doing that.
Again, there's a theme here that a lot of my established recruiter friends are like, "I don't know why you would talk to them. Those roles don't pay."
And I'm like, "Okay. That's okay." One day they're not going to be an entry level work person all the time. I'm going to make connections where I can make them, and we really need to be in a situation where we're treating talent as a capital asset and not as an HR function, because it's just as important that big money coming in that we're putting back into the workforce.
Matt Horine: No, spot on. That's, I think, really well said. So we'll be [00:30:00] sure to link that in our comment section for the show. And Michael, thank you very much for joining us today.
Michael Chambers: Yeah, of course. Thank you.
Matt Horine: This is exactly the conversation our listeners needed. If you've not known about the Battery Belt in full, what it is, and what's at stake for American manufacturing and the human capital execution gap, and how that will determine whether the reindustrialization promise delivers, this is a great starting point.
The Battery Belt is a capital story, policy story, and a supply chain story, but it's also something that Michael made very clear today. It's a human talent story. Companies that solve the talent equation first are the ones that execute while everyone else is still talking about the numbers. To stay ahead of the curve and to help plan your strategy, please check out our website at variableapps.com and under the resources section titled Trump 2.0, where you can see the framework around upcoming policies from the administration and how they will impact you as a manufacturer.
If you're on socials, give us a follow on LinkedIn, X, formerly Twitter, and Instagram. And if you're enjoying the podcast, please feel free to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, and leave us a rating and don't forget to subscribe. Thank you again for joining us and learning more about how you can make your way.