‘Use uncertainty to your advantage’: Seven ways to use The Great Resignation to find the best staff
A challenging hiring market is forcing employers to think and plan ahead, and reframe the way we look at teams and recruitment.
There’s no doubt that the hiring market is struggling right now, some industries more than others.
The Great Resignation brings us a challenge we are yet to overcome and forces us to think and plan ahead, and reframe the way we look at teams and hiring.
In May 2021, Australian job vacancies peaked at 369,900, an almost 40-year record high, and they continue to remain much higher than pre-COVID conditions.
Here’s how you can leverage it.
1. Chill out, step back, and remember where you are going
It is easy to get caught up in all the media and hype, stress ourselves out, and make frantic decisions. Believe it or not, a huge change you cannot control is a great time to step back and re-look at how you do business. I suggest a ‘clarity break’ with yourself.
2. Survey your team so you’re working with real data
Understanding where your current staff are at can give you the insight you need. Don’t assume you know. Out of the many team audits we have done with companies, 100% of the time the owner discovered things they had not known.
Work backward from what you want to know to design the best questions. Some basic examples include:
- Do you have access to the things you need to perform well in your role?
- Have you been promised something you have not yet received?
- Do you receive appropriate recognition when you do a good job?
- Which new responsibilities, if any, would you like to take on? Or do you want to see your role changed in any way?
- What is the biggest challenge or issue you are facing that you would like assistance with?
3. Relook at how you can deliver at capacity, with a newly structured team
Now is a great time to decide if offshore or virtual workers will work for you, if you should consolidate those two roles you were wondering about, or if you should outsource that department altogether. Really get to the bottom of how much each role really should be producing and work backwards to see how you can make this happen consistently. This may bring to light a whole new way of structuring your team you never had the mental space to figure out.
4. Define who you are as an employer
It may seems too basic, but you attract what you can simplify and advertise. The same works with job ads. If you don’t have some way you are different, better or stronger than other employers, then why should you ask the same about candidates?
You shouldn’t have to beg candidates to join your team — you should be so brilliant that they know it is a privilege to work for you. This should filter throughout your careers page, job ads, company LinkedIn and company Facebook page.
5. Work out how you can reward performance
Staff shouldn’t be rewarded for just being there (beyond their paycheck) but performance should be celebrated. You tend to get more of whatever you focus on. There is no point in hiring new staff if you have a hole in the bottom of your bucket.
For once and for all, figure out who in your team is objectively performing well, and find a way to reward it.
Define the KPIs you’ve been avoiding for years. Ask other businesses how they do this. Research and find the best ways. We have found that experiences and physical objects are the best rewards for staff as they will always be tied back to you, can be appreciated physically, and don’t just disappear from mind like money can.
6. If hiring, get clever with job ad titles, categories and copy
Here are our top tips for effective job ads:
1. Write interesting job ad titles that make you stand out like a sore thumb. Be creative with ad titles so you gain as much interest as possible. Come up with new ways to describe the role in a way that makes people click.
2. Post multiple ads across multiple categories. One of our best kept secrets is writing multiple ads that go in different categories. Cross-placing ads can up your applicants by 100%. The idea is you create different archetypes of people who could be successful in this role: a junior you could train up; an experienced person who can start straight away; or someone with parallel qualifications in a completely different field you could convince to transfer over, etc. Each archetype is a new opportunity for you to place an ad in a different category. If you know your role could be done by two types of people then promote two jobs ads written specifically for them in the categories they would be looking in.
3. Structure the ad so they cannot stop reading. Most job ads are dry. They are the same as all others, talk about all the lovely things the candidate will get, how they must be reliable and professional, on and on. Change it up by writing something they can’t stop reading by speaking to what is real. Paint a real picture that is honest. Highlight the challenges, not the benefits (truly productive staff love a challenge).
7. If hiring, open up any role you can to “100% Working from Home”. It can give you 5x more choice.
We recently completed a hiring project for a client where we opened up the role to working from home 100% of the time. This allowed us to advertise the role in three cities in Australia, as well as Auckland, NZ. The role got 579 applicants in total. We ran these applicants through our bulk-screening and chose the best candidate who resides in Auckland. To give you an idea of how successful just one of these ads was:
Use this uncertain time to your advantage. Define all the things that have been on your to-do list for years and be bold in this new age with how you want to structure your team and hire new talent.
