One of the biggest hurdles businesses are facing right now is an ongoing challenge to hire people who bring the skills and experience they need at a salary they can afford—and at a time when economic uncertainty is starting to impact business growth for a lot of companies. With low unemployment rates and high salary expectations, your typical recruiting approach needs an update. If you’re having a hard time hiring, here are some tips to help you attract and close people before your competitor does.
Hire for Soft Skills, Not Hard Skills
Sure, we’d all like to bring someone in out of the gate with the right mix of skills and experience, but if you have other hurdles to overcome, hiring for soft skills instead of hard skills can be a good approach. Hard skills (like knowing how to do a certain task, use a specific program, or run a piece of technology) are prone to changing over time anyway, and can be taught. Soft skills (like communication, polish and professionalism, judgement, time management, and attention to detail) are harder to train for. If you’re able to hire someone smart with some great foundational soft skills, investing in on-the-job training can be a good way to offset initial skill gaps.
Reconsider Outdated Requirements
We’re seeing an influx of college graduates who are poorly equipped for the workplace, making the value of many degrees much less than in previous decades. And yet most grads are asking for top starting salaries when they’re bringing very little to the table initially. If you’re struggling to hire, remember “The School of Life” exists too, and sometimes we find more success hiring that way. Many companies have bachelor’s degree requirements that have been in place for ages, but the quality of new graduates is not what it used to be, particularly when it comes to communication, motivation, and critical thinking. Similarly, you can also consider changing your requirements for certifications, years of experience, or even tenure prior to considering existing employees for promotions.
Educate Yourself on Compensation
We’ve seen The Great Resignation and The Great Reshuffle bring inflated salaries as employees jumped ship for new jobs during and after the pandemic. This created panic for employers which drove up salaries for a while. As a result, many people got an inflated sense of what their job was worth and what they could ask for. We’re often seeing candidates requesting increases of 15-20%+ just to consider making a move which makes things tough for employers. A formal compensation analysis is a critical piece of any updated hiring strategy. You need to know where you rank among your competition, but it’s important that you compare apples to apples, and not apples to cars. Valuable compensation data is employer reported and factors in things like industry, location (at a regional, state, and city level), company size, company revenue, job responsibilities, education, and required certifications. Getting clear on where you rank is important. It will help you understand your market and competition better which will ultimately help you know if you need to make up for lower-than-average compensation by identifying and effectively selling other perks, benefits, or opportunities at your company.
Revisit Your Company Culture
Recruiting and hiring isn’t just about the money. Having a culture that attracts and retains great people is more important than ever, especially as GenZ continues to enter the workforce. This means really examining what your business stands for and refining the messaging around it, getting a clear understanding of what perks and benefits matter to your employees and working to offer those, having managers who exemplify your values and goals, and offering flexibility. Many businesses have abandoned remote work options even after knowing that was one of the most important elements to their employees. Get to know your people and what matters to them. Focus on what sets you apart, ideally developing something unique (whether it’s a mindset, perk, benefit, or approach to your work) that is genuine, interesting, and enticing so you can use it to bolster your recruiting efforts and stand out from your competition.
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