Michelin sees success with Aboriginals

When Janet Kennedy joined Michelin North America (Canada) in 2000 as director of personnel group services, she soon realized the company was going to have serious demographic challenges — since the company’s manufacturing started in Nova Scotia in the 1970s and employees usually stayed long-term, 70 per cent of the 3,500-employee workforce was expected to retire over the next decade.

And along with the lure of retirement was the lure of the West, as an ongoing flow of East coast applicants headed to Alberta.

“We were looking for ways we could help address some of these issues with this demographic shift,” she says.

In 2003, the company signed an agreement to work with the provincial and federal governments to develop employment for Aboriginals at its three plants. Located in rural areas, the plants were surrounded by Aboriginal communities that were growing at a rapid rate, but suffering from higher-than-average rates of unemployment.

So as part of the agreement, Michelin conducted an inventory of its plants and identified potential jobs, while the government, through the Aboriginal Workforce Participation Initiative (AWPI), worked to educate and inform employers about the advantages of hiring Aboriginals.

“We wanted to work on a partnership and not have this as an employment equity situation, where we were hiring people who didn’t have the skills to come into the organization, just because of their equity position,” says Kennedy. “We wanted individuals who were qualified to come into the workforce.”

Recruitment challenges

Michelin’s recruitment process involves three steps: an application form, a workplace skills inventory (which measures literacy, numeracy, math skills and reading comprehension, set at a Grade 8 test level), and an interview. When Michelin usually did this process, 70 per cent of the population passed with a score of 85 per cent. However, when Aboriginal applicants took the test, only 34 per cent were passing.

“We were very concerned about why there was this difference,” says Kennedy.

Michelin realized part of the scoring from its application forms was based on prior experience and Aboriginals often did volunteer work or community work that was not reflected in the scoring, so the company altered the system. In addition, it developed a training course to improve skills.

“It was a learning process for both of us,” says Kennedy, referring to the development of an eight-week refresher course, which included practice on behavioural interview techniques.

“It really helped them as a refresher, for math skills, science skills, English and reading comprehension, to make them successful in our work environment. Our work environment has been evolving for the last 30 years significantly, to a lot of computer-based machinery, and it really takes those kinds of skills to be successful.”

Michelin eventually worked with community colleges to offer the course, which is partly funded by the AWPI.

“It’s becoming very popular, particularly in community colleges where we have our plants, for not only Aboriginals but the general population as well. It’s worked very well for us,” says Kennedy.

Recruiting efforts were also broadened, as Michelin previously had advertised locally, largely in newspapers, but started advertising on reserves near its facilities and partnering with First Net, an online Aboriginal network, which provides a link to Michelin’s recruiting website.

The company also wanted to ensure the organization was welcoming to Aboriginal employees so it ran mandatory four-hour diversity training for every employee and two days of training for every manager, covering diversity in general.

However, feedback from the workforce showed, from an Aboriginal perspective, this wasn’t quite enough, says Kennedy. Michelin discovered, in Nova Scotia in particular, there is some resentment of Aboriginals from the general population, for example, of hunting and fishing rights. So the company took another step back and ran specific Aboriginal-awareness training within its facilities “to make it a little more of a welcoming environment,” says Kennedy.

An advisory council of Aboriginal leaders also meets regularly with Michelin senior managers to advise them on appropriate strategies and actions.

Also an issue was the company’s employee assistance program, which usually had very strong participation for counselling services, but not with Aboriginal employees. When Michelin inquired about the reluctance to participate, it found these employees weren’t familiar or comfortable with the types of programs in place. So the company established Aboriginal counsellors within its EAP to do more traditional counselling for Aboriginal populations — and participation rates increased.

“We wanted to make sure we provided as much support as we could,” she says.

Successful integration

Since the signing of the AWPI agreement, applications from the Aboriginal community have increased significantly, from 20 in 2002 to about 300 annually. In the first five years of the partnership, Michelin’s Aboriginal employment more than doubled and it now has a greater percentage of Aboriginal employees than the representative population in Nova Scotia. Before the agreement, about 1.2 per cent of the population was Aboriginal and less than 0.5 per cent of Michelin’s workforce was Aboriginal. By 2007, 1.3 per cent of the company’s workforce was Aboriginal.

“It’s been very successful in attracting people to the organization,” says Kennedy. “We kind of started out small and worked our way through each of the issues.”

Not only that, the Aboriginal community has signed two similar agreements in the province with the Nova Scotia Nurses’ Union and the Trucking Human Resource Sector Council, she says, “so they’re very pleased as well, and they’re using our agreement as a model as they move forward with others.”