If you like to keep your eye on the big horizon, then it’s nice to say: “If you can’t find new employees, you don’t have a recruiting problem, you have a corporate culture problem.” There is certainly some truth to this and it does result in colossal consulting and change projects. But since the challenge is usually how to get the employees I need in a few weeks, we have summarised seven tips that can be implemented relatively quickly.

         1.optimise job ads – layout & messages

It still exists: the job ad. More often now on a job portal than on old-fashioned paper, but if we assume that the content is predefined, there are still gigantic differences in what content should be mentioned and how it should be placed visually. There are miserable methods and state-of-the-art implicit methods (i.e. those that the respondent does not see through). These are exactly the ones you should use. Details in the next article.

       2. My Home Is My Castle

If you don’t explicitly include “home office” in your job advertisement, you are simply foregoing half of the potential applicants in the white-collar sector, even before a potential interview that will never take place. It is not yet defined whether the home office will be available three times a week from day one or only once a month. Technically, since Corona, every company has the possibilities for this, and in terms of content, the only question is how much home office makes sense.

     3. Speed (S)kills

How quickly should you respond after an application? Simple answer: immediately. Immediately is somewhere between 30 minutes and a day at most. If you can’t do that, you’ll have to outsource the job with exactly that in mind. The first contact does not make much of a difference. You should conduct talks and interviews and give feedback with the same speed. It’s good that you can already do a lot online here. You don’t like that? Unfortunately, that is no longer the question: your target group likes it all the same.

      4. Find a Friend

Not long ago, I asked an employee of a leading job portal how one actually finds employees there. At the source, so to speak, where you can place as many ads as you want at no cost. The answer surprised me to some extent: employees are incentivised to persuade friends to apply. If a company that doesn’t have a shortage of job ads does this, it should be adopted as a blueprint. For 1,000 euros bonus, many employees can have very motivating conversations and will be careful not to recommend someone who does not fit the company.

      5. Tell a Story

The head of the Public Employment Service in Austria has written to the companies that they have to “dance”. This is a wide field, but ultimately an expression of the phenomenon that the labour market has turned around. It is no longer the employers who pick the best applicants from a wide field, but the future employees who look for the best employers and dancing can help a little. In concrete terms, you have to be prepared for questions that you used to like to ask yourself: “Where do you see your company in five years?” will be the new classic and in this race, the winners will be those who have a good story to tell that motivates and carries you along. This can also be trained and optimised.

       6. Find those who are not looking

Why are so many more employees suddenly changing jobs than a few years ago? There is a simple reason: Because even the most loyal souls suddenly get very concrete offers via Linked-In and similar platforms several times a month, which at some point you no longer ignore and which are in any case there to reconsider your own market value. Everybody does that! If you have been searching only through job ads until now, you are narrowing down the market to that segment that is actively looking. In fact, you need to approach people well in advance. Your competitors do the same with their employees

       7. Globalisation is the engine

The labour market, measured in terms of the number of people employed, has been growing non-stop year after year for 60 years. The main driver for this in the last 10 years has been migration. Strictly speaking, those who are shy about taking on foreign employees may not feel a shortage of skilled workers at all. The question is often rather whether one should not recruit directly abroad or delegate this task to professionals. Depending on the size of the company, you have to think further and move entire departments abroad. This is quicker and easier than some people think, although one should have no illusions that skilled workers would be readily available “abroad”. In fact, there are only a few islands left where a large supply of skilled workers meets a weak economy, and there you can quickly build up local companies that can dock quickly thanks to digitalisation.

         8. Digitalisation can be an option

So far, digitalisation has created more workers than it has saved, which is one reason for the shortage of skilled workers. For the individual company, however, the situation is different. There are many areas where you can also replace workers through digitalisation, and these are rarely jobs that anyone is crying over. The longer the labour market is affected by staff shortages, the faster digital models will take hold. In Japan, you can see pretty well how robots, telemedicine and self-check-ins are simply replacing staff in an ageing society.

       9. Forming and binding

If you are not 100% satisfied, try 80%. That used to be a passable joke, now it’s a reality in the labour market. Don’t just look for immediate performance, look for potential. In our culture, unfortunately, degrees and titles are still valued more highly than universally applicable skills. Define what you can teach someone in two to three months and what basic skills they can have to do that. You expand your target group and can also retain employees who will then be available to you for a long time.

       10. Full-time hurts

We are slowly getting onto thin ice, where not every employer can keep up, but the reality should not be concealed. Full-time is certainly still the ticket to a great career and a fatter wallet, but the ideals of Generation Z look very different and the work-life balance asks for part-time. Economically, this is a disaster in that a high proportion of part-time workers that exacerbates the labour shortage, as more people are needed to fill the same number of vacancies. Nevertheless, this phenomenon will remain. Here we have reached a point where many companies cannot change anything quickly. Step one – and this much flexibility is required of every company – is to introduce a flexitime agreement, then you can at least agree on flexible working hours. With further concessions, one has to weigh up – as with all offers to new employees – to what extent the same goodies can be given to the permanent staff.

24/10/2022

Copyright: Interconnection, Publication free of charge for coverage regarding the study and InterConnection Consulting.