Our topic for this month, for the blogs and newsletter, is “The shrinking recruitment pool.” During covid, the advent of people working from home changed the whole working mindset for many. People have become less motivated, and the kind of personnel you want for your company—sales and otherwise—have become increasingly harder to find.
Potential personnel didn't base these mindset changes on their own ideas. It just happened that, as an evolution of the pandemic environment, some people found they could make more money by taking unemployment along with stimulus payments. They became willing to accept less than they were truly capable of.
Many people without jobs today might be recruits for the many companies seeking to hire. As we pointed out in our previous blog posts, those aren’t necessarily the people you want to hire. We provided five primary characteristics you want to watch for when hiring.
As a final note for this month, we want to point out that all of these factors must apply to your existing personnel as well. This means watching out for agreement with wrong ideas of living off unemployment and stimulus payments, looking for the same five primary characteristics as you would in a new recruit, and asking thought-provoking questions of your current employees to see where they really sit thought-wise.
In other words, your existing team is no different. You must view and evaluate them the same way as you would new recruits. The points we’ve made in this month’s blogs and newsletter tie directly to the retention of your current employees.
In the same way that many jobless people have been tempted away from looking for actual work by the lure of free money in the form of unemployment and stimulus payments, so have your current staff. They hear all about these “freebies” from people they know and, unfortunately, from the media. They’re constantly tempted to go off and “have it easy” as, perhaps, some of their friends or acquaintances might be doing.
For these reasons, you must be as vigilant with current employees as you would be in hiring a new person. Interact with them—more so than in pre-covid times. Understand what their goals and dreams are, and that they’re on a path to achieve their goals.
Employees can become disgruntled when they make a straight hourly wage or salary, and there is a cap to it. In other words, no matter how fantastic they do on the job, they’re still making the same money. Even if you give them a raise, there’s still a cap on their income. In that case, there’s no real incentive for them to produce more, work harder, and do a better job.
Companies traditionally have tended to try and retain their more valuable employees and try to hire the more attractive recruits through wages and incentives. But if you really want to make sure you hang on to your most valuable staff, tie wages and incentives to production. In other words, the better they do, the more they produce, the more they make.
Back to this month's newsletter, click here: https://mailchi.mp/b1df2851f7f1/the-dangerously-shrinking-recruitment-pool
