What if the best way to win the war for talent is to stop hiring the way everyone else does? When great people are hard to find, the obvious response is to compete harder for the same candidates. The smarter response might be to change the rules.
Target a completely different workforce
When discount airline easyJet struggled to recruit cabin crew, they looked at who they were traditionally hiring – and then looked elsewhere. Instead of chasing younger recruits, they began targeting over-50s, inspired in part by research showing that many people who change careers after 50 report greater happiness.
The result? They doubled the number of cabin crew aged over 50. And they found an unexpected bonus: customers and colleagues valued the life experience the new recruits brought with them.
Sometimes the talent shortage isn’t a shortage of talent. It’s a shortage of imagination.
Change the working week
The small rural West Australian town of Boyup Brook faced a different problem as attracting high achievers became increasingly difficult. So they are now trying something unconventional: a four-day working week. Employees still work 38 hours — they simply squeeze those hours into four days, giving them a three-day weekend. The council says that after 6 months, the trial has already proved successful, with the shire able to recruit for a senior position it had been unable to fill before.
Whether a four-day week works for every organisation is another question. But the principle is worth stealing: If people don’t want the job you’re offering, change the job.
Or you can ignore what people want…
There’s an equally powerful lesson in the opposite direction. A recruiter at a large international retailer told me they had been successfully filling vacancies with high-quality candidates – until Head Office announced that working from home was being scrapped. They advertised the same role the following week. Applications went from 180 to 12. And, according to the recruiter, the quality of applicants fell dramatically.
The high achievers simply went elsewhere – to employers offering the flexibility they wanted.
The hiring lesson?
You can spend more money on recruiters, advertise in more places and complain about the talent shortage. Or you can ask a more interesting question:
What if we changed the rules?
Because sometimes winning the war for talent isn’t about finding more people.
It’s about becoming the kind of organisation more people want to work for.
And that’s a pretty good place to start breaking the rules.