Planning for a New Year with New Challenges – How to Stay Ahead of Your Staffing Challenges.

Having a strong, capable team is critical to ensure your company’s ongoing success. However, that’s become more difficult to achieve in recent years. Labor shortages and skill gaps negatively impact recruitment. Additionally, employee retention is increasingly challenging in the wake of the Great Resignation and shifting expectations created by the pandemic.

While staffing challenges are commonly part of the landscape, there are steps companies can take to increase their odds of hiring success. If you’re planning for the new year and want to prepare for these issues, here’s how you can stay ahead.

Identify Your Genuine Priorities

Before you work to fill a vacancy, you need to completely understand your hiring priorities. Examine the current team and its cumulative skillset. Identify what’s missing that you can’t cover through upskilling or internal training. Then, assess the value of those absent capabilities. By using that approach, you can determine if a specific skill area is the clear priority.

Once you know what’s genuinely a must-have, you can relegate other abilities to the “nice-to-have” category. This allows you to shorten your required skills list, opening you up to more candidates while ensuring they can meet your core needs.

Don’t Ignore Culture Fit and Potential

While it’s common to prioritize hard skills during the hiring process, it shouldn’t come at the expense of culture fit and broader potential. Finding candidates that mesh with your environment and align with your mission and values increases the odds of a successful match. Additionally, candidates with potential are often moldable and trainable, allowing you to turn them into your ideal employee in short order.

Make sure you factor in the candidate’s mindset and perspective when making hiring decisions. Also, decide whether you’re willing to train a job seeker if they’re short on a particular skill but have an excellent foundation and remarkable attitude. That prevents you from overlooking talent simply because they don’t check one specific box, opening you up to more highly-capable talent.

Embrace Flexible Solutions

Today, many companies are dealing with a range of uncertainties. The economy is in flux, and it isn’t clear how long inflation will impact bottom lines or if a recession will occur. In many cases, this makes bringing on new permanent employees daunting, as payroll costs are typically a significant part of any company’s budget.

By embracing flexible hiring solutions instead, you can access top talent while maintaining agility. Temporary workers allow businesses to scale up and down as needed. Additionally, partnering with a recruitment agency can reduce risk and lower hiring costs. The burden of unemployment and worker’s compensation falls on the recruitment firm, which can be a relief in these challenging times.

Recruitment agencies also have temp-to-hire programs. Through these, companies can bring an employee in without committing to a permanent hire right away. Along with the cost and risk-reducing benefits above, it allows organizations to conduct working interviews to ensure a job seeker is the right fit before extending a permanent offer.

If you’re in need of a flexible hiring solution to ensure you stay ahead of staffing challenges in 2023, Hamilton-Ryker wants to hear from you. Contact us to learn more about our services today.