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Employee Attraction and Retention

As well as attracting the right people with the right skills, we seek to engage with them and support them to ensure they stay with the company. We use smart and mobile technology, including social media, to make the hiring process more efficient and more positive for the candidates.

Finding the Right Talent

To help attract a diverse range of qualified job candidates, we partner with professional organizations, and seek to build relationships with top universities to find the best students and recent graduates. In many cases, our executives visit campuses to share information and meet the next generation of potential automotive leaders.

In addition, we attend meetings in the communities in which we live and work to foster relationships with individuals and companies, to build connections and expand collaboration.

But in this age of the internet and social media, our approach to attracting talent increasingly makes use of mobile and online technology to make the process more efficient and effective:

  • Hackathons

    In the U.S., Ford participates in hackathons, both on campus to support college students and via non-campus events such as Global Hack VI. These events, at which programmers, software developers and interface designers collaborate intensively on a particular challenge or task, help us engage with the software community, share the projects we’re working on and build awareness of Ford as a technology employer of choice.

  • Geofilters

    With apps like SnapChat, we are using geofilters at our Ford Day events and at professional organization conferences to let more people know we’re available to answer their career questions. Through filters on the platforms they already use, we can inform students about on-site events they may not have known about previously.

  • Online Careers Fairs and Talks

    Virtual careers fairs are another great way to reach students and alumni. We use them – from niche fairs for software engineers to broader virtual college career fairs – across the U.S., enabling us to interact with more candidates in a cost-effective way.

    Similarly, in China, we use mobile technology to increase our engagement with potential hires, offering online sessions alongside traditional on-campus events. Online Campus Talk, which can be accessed and replayed at any time from any location, includes recorded videos, downloadable materials and a live questions-and-answers function. To date, more than 2,000 students from hundreds of universities have viewed 48,000 hours of information about careers at Ford.

Keeping the Best Onboard

We know that once the right candidates are hired, it is equally important to provide them with a strong and positive onboarding experience that will improve employee retention. For example, our onboarding program in the U.S., Get Started, provides new employees with the tools and networks they need to be productive as soon as possible.

This program includes an overview of the company and the resources available to new recruits, as well as a corporate orientation, including presentations, Q&As with each skill team area and meet-and-greets with Ford’s senior leaders. We are now leveraging The Hub, an internal social media platform, to further engage our new employees and build the Get Started community.

Our efforts in attracting, engaging and developing our people is reflected in our excellent retention rates, with our Voluntary Quit Rate below the market benchmark in all major markets in the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific.

  See our Voluntary Quit Rate data in detail

Why Ford? Why Stay?

In a recent series of focus groups with employees from all regions, we asked why people were attracted to Ford and why they stayed with the company.

In particular, participants had positive things to say about:

  • Ford’s history, reputation and brand value
  • The career development opportunities available, including the ability to rotate jobs and move locations
  • The range of formal and informal training opportunities
  • The importance of diversity
  • The people, the family culture and Ford’s values