Winning the War for Talent in a Tight Labor Market
There are two critical success factors when it comes to competing in a tight labor market. Those two areas are attracting the employees you need and retaining them once you hire them.
Author: Solutions Staffing
Help Me Help You: Why Your Feedback on Candidates is Critical
You may want to review resumes before interviewing candidates as a way to protect your time from people you believe you won’t be able to hire (even though we will make the case that the resumes are not the candidate, and the intangibles are as crucial to success as a candidate’s experience). You might also interview candidates for a temporary or temp-to-hire position to make certain the employee is going to be a good fit and to avoid a bad hire (no one is more sensitive to the high cost of bad hires than we are).
Don’t Automate the Most Important Decision You Make for Your Business
We’ve noticed a lot of changes in recruiting over the past few years. There are more platforms designed to connect employers with potential employees, many of which use an algorithm to push “qualified” candidates to the employer. Countless companies have reached out to us, many overseas, who believe that recruiting should be outsourced to reduce the costs of “sourcing” resumes. These groups rely on artificial intelligence to scour the internet and scrape resumes. We’ve also heard from clients that they have had interviews with candidates who never interviewed with the staffing firm that sent them the candidate.
Why You Need to Hire Faster Now
There is no question that this is a tight labor market and that it is, in fact, getting even more difficult. When a commodity is highly desired and scarce, two things tend to happen: 1) the commodity becomes more expensive, and 2) the competition to possess that commodity increases. Both of these factors are now true when it comes to hiring the talent you need to staff your business.
What Slows Hiring
There are a few things that we see companies do that cause them to lose a contest for the talent they need.
The first way companies slow the process is believing the resume is the person (an idea that later causes disappointment when they hire with too little regard for the intangibles that make up a successful hire). By eliminating candidates without getting a clear view of who they are, what they can do, and how well they fit, massively decreases the speed at which you hire.
We know this to be true because we interview hundreds of candidates each day. Many candidates hand us resumes that don’t reflect their real skills and intangibles (many who are way better than what you see on paper, and some who look much better on paper but lack the attributes that would make them a good fit).
To speed up your hiring process, you start by looking at more people faster. The rejection of resumes that aren’t “perfect,” means overlooking people who are perfect for the role and your specific company because the resume doesn’t reflect the person as well as an interview would (we’ve fallen in love with candidates once we had a chance to meet them).
The second way we see companies lose the competition for the talent they need is by taking their time hiring the candidates they are considering. In most cases, you need the staff, but are overwhelmed and too busy to make time to interview. In the worst cases, we have seen companies interview an individual and schedule a second interview three weeks later. During the intervening weeks, the candidate they want to hire meets with other companies and takes a position. These companies lose the candidate because they were too slow. It’s important that the critical roles get enough of a priority on your calendar to acquire the people you need.
Your Most Important Decision
We don’t believe that you should take shortcuts in the hiring process, as doing so only creates problems later. We are so traditional that we interview every candidate face-to-face, and we require second interviews before placing candidates, the second interview being client specific. Whatever your process is, the key to acquiring the people you need is to be efficient in this process and close any of the gaps that leave the candidate open to accepting another position.
Hiring well isn’t easy, and it takes time. Because who you bring onto your team is the most important decision you make, when labor markets are tight, the speed at which you do so can create a competitive advantage. Follow a process that ensures you hire well, and make sure that you close any gaps that slow your process and cause you to miss hiring the people you need.
Why You Need to Hire for Intangibles
Some positions require hiring someone based on what we might describe as “tangibles,” those things that are objective, things that you can measure. You don’t want to hire a tax accountant based on their charming personality alone; it matters that they have the requisite skill sets. Nor do you want to hire a forklift operator on their optimistic belief that they can “drive anything,” something many prospective lift operators have said to us in interviews.
Why Your Shift Hours Are Reducing Your Candidate Pool
We spend a lot of time helping our clients understand the labor market, what temporary employees want, and how to build an employee value proposition that will help them succeed in a competitive marketplace. We start each year with an employee preferences survey to gain insight into what potential employees generally want, knowing that each employee may be looking for something specific (we capture these insights in one-on-one interviews).
A Scary Labor Market Statistic That Explains Everything
We have been watching and sharing our ideas about the changing labor marketplace for years. Two of the biggest trends that we watch closely are the shrinking availability of employees and their increasing costs. If you believe that labor is still abundant, this statistic should disabuse you of that belief.
The Resume Is Not the Candidate
We have placed hundreds of thousands of people in jobs since 1980. Over a long period of time, experience teaches you things that you would have a tough time learning any other way. It’s not that what you learn is counter-intuitive, but more the fact that the common practices are at odds with what is truth.
The Competitive Advantage of Being Nice
Every year, our internal surveys and our turnover reports point to an unexpected trend when it comes to retention: Being nice to people is a competitive advantage.