In yesterday’s Advisor, BLR® Contributing Editor Jennifer Carsen, JD, helped us understand the hiring shortages in the new economy. Today, we present her techniques for filling those hard-to-fill positions.
 |
Practical Solutions for Hard-to-Fills
Regardless of the impact of the skills gap, the bottom line is that there is a lot employers can do proactively to locate the talent they require and successfully bring it aboard. Some of the solutions that organizations have turned to include:
- Evaluate your pay and benefits for positions that are hard to fill. Are you leading or lagging in the market? You may have to bite the bullet and offer more, especially if you have been relatively stagnant with your annual increases in rate ranges.
- Offer training programs to existing employees or candidates. Many employers are finding success by instituting their own training programs in order to get the skills they need when candidates don’t already have them. Pay will be lower than for fully trained individuals, and you get to train people in your specific systems and to your specific standards.
Recruiting is a challenge for 2015. Learn what’s happening in the real world with our new research report, Recruiting Best Practices: Finding and Attracting Talent in 2015’s Challenging Business Climate. Learn More.
- Pair up with local education and/or training institutions. Perhaps they will be able to offer the type of training you need candidates to have.
- Send employees to school. Similarly, some employers are opting to pay for the education that their existing employees need in order to advance into new positions.
- Widen the recruiting parameters. Maybe you need to recruit from an expanded geographic range and commit to paying relocation expenses.
- Consider telecommuting. Many employers don’t like telecommuting but have found that that’s the only way they can attract the candidates they want. And, your available talent pool widens exponentially if you’re not limited to candidates who are already within, or willing to relocate to, your specific area.
- Work your networks. Great current employees can often lead you to great future employees—formal referral programs are a good way to encourage these types of hires.
- Get social. If you are not already using popular social media channels, like LinkedIn and Twitter, as part of your candidate sourcing and recruiting efforts, it’s high time to get started. Social media helps you effectively expand your recruiting reach and your company’s branding efforts—all for no cost other than the time invested.
Perhaps the biggest productive step you can take in this area is more akin to a mental leap. As global workplace research consultancy Manpower puts it so well in its White Paper, Teachable Fit: A New Approach for Easing the Talent Mismatch, “Employers must recalibrate their mindsets to consider candidates who may not meet all the job specifications, but whose capability gaps can be filled in a timely and cost-effective way.”
Today’s Top Hard-to-Fill Positions
According to ManpowerGroup’s Talent Shortage Survey, here are the top 10 most difficult jobs for employers to fill as of 2014:
- Skilled trade workers
- Restaurant and hotel staff
- Sales reps
- Teachers
- Drivers
- Accounting and finance staff
- Laborers
- IT staff
- Engineers
- Nurses
Curious to know more about what else is going on with recruiting in the real world? We can help. Six times a year, the HR Daily Advisor Research Team conducts detailed research into contemporary HR challenges to highlight best practices and common policies and procedures. The topic for this report is one of the most pressing for human resources—recruiting.
Recruiting is changing at a rapid pace. Some organizations are abandoning traditional methods for social media; some think software can do a better job than people. See the results of our national survey as well as demographic breakdowns for each question.
Available in both print and downloadable PDF versions.
Recruiting strategies? Onboarding practices? What’s working in retention? It’s all in this report: Recruiting Best Practices: Finding and Attracting Talent in 2015’s Challenging Business Climate. Click Here.
Among the features of this new product:
- Results from our national survey on recruiting best practices
- Further results of a supplemental survey on recruitment metrics and costs
- National data from the main survey broken down by key demographics
- Summaries and highlights
- And much more!
Don’t be left in the dark! With the information in this report, you will get a feel for what’s working out there—and maybe learn a little about what your competitors might be up to.