Finding the best people to join your team is now more difficult than ever. With increasing costs, customer demands, and competition, it’s more important than ever to have a strong employer brand and high-performing teams. But with more opportunities and fewer candidates, there’s an inevitable talent squeeze. So, is there a solution?
Despite shortages, often (in our experience, more than half the time) there are good people who are ideally suited. But the more you need, the harder it gets. Sure, you could give the job to someone who probably “can” do it with a bit of luck, but that requires you to reduce your standards or risk a fit problem, making things worse. But what if you didn’t need them in the first place, so you didn’t need to take those risks?
The math tells us that most often you only need to replace as many people as leave. So, if you double your staff turnover, you double your need to recruit, and more than double your risk of making mistakes because beggars can’t be choosers. Pretty quickly, yours cannot be the “best” team, and things go downhill from there.
On the other hand, if you can halve your staff turnover, you only need to find half as many new team members. This allows you to be selective to preserve your performance and behavioral standards. In turn, this stabilises (and probably lifts) the rest of the team and improves your employer reputation.
You’re going to say it’s not that easy, and point out many different reasons why people leave that you can’t do anything about. OK, that could be true, but to settle for that is a copout. Some people leave for reasons you can’t influence, just as you can’t influence whether someone is sick or not. However, there is ample evidence that absenteeism and resignations reflect employee engagement and fulfillment at least as much as purely personal reasons.
Why? Absence, temporary or permanent, is very often an escape from your work environment, either temporary or permanent. Why would people choose to spend any more time than they have to in a situation that is unrewarding or upsetting for them? From a motivation perspective, they are more motivated to not be there than they are to be there. And guess who created or allowed that?
One way or another, the solution to most recruitment problems is to not need to recruit. The saving in time, money, stress, disruption, and lost productivity speaks for itself. How? Well, that’s the difference between managers coping the best they can, as we all have at some stage, versus thoroughly trained and professional team leadership. The difference is easier than you think, and anyone who wants to make the change usually can.
Struggling with recruitment or employee engagement? Learn how 21 Triangles can provide practical solutions.
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