To fill unfillable vacancies often requires a quantum shift in thinking. Take the French government who have launched a major national initiative for the employment of applicants of 50 years and over. Their stated goal was to give new visibility to experienced workers and extend their career paths and the campaign includes conferences, changing the laws and public policy and improving access to jobs via retraining. You may be an ‘oldie’ but you’re now officially a ‘goodie’ in Paris.
With major skill shortages around the world, this type of employment should be a no brainer. Yet it’s not and there are a couple of compelling reasons why over-50s are still an untapped labour market. Firstly recruiters often tend to employ people like themselves. Rugby players may employ rugby players, dog lovers may employ dog lovers and young recruiters may employ predominantly younger applicants. Unfortunately these biases are often incompatible with effective recruitment
The second reason these older workers are overlooked is because companies often don’t recognise that good applicants come in all shapes and sizes. Often their target market is so limited by conventional thinking that the type of people they’re looking for is too small or non-existent.
This is the killer scenario faced by many organisations. They might have made significant improvements to many of their attraction and hiring processes but, for some positions, they still struggle to find good people. The recruiter gives up and the organisation is forced to adjust its business objectives, like the global retailing CEO who told me he’d put all his expansion plans on hold because his company was simply unable to get good staff.
To achieve hiring success, these organisations first need to modify their thinking as to who are the most suitable applicants to fill their vacancies.
Examples of Innovative Thinking To Fill Vacancies
When the Four Seasons group opened a deluxe hotel in Hawaii, they found it difficult to find trained staff to fill their vacancies and often employed people from the mainland. These imported workers tended not to stay very long, which led to high staff turnover and poor client servicing. Over time, the company realised that they had completely overlooked a large candidate pool that could fill all their positions: hardworking people employed on the local pineapple farms. They began to target these great-attitude workers, trained them in the necessary skills and became the number-one hotel on the island within 12 months.
Or take the fibre-glassing supervisor who realised that females, with their smaller hands, were perfect recruits for the new resin infusion technique that had just been developed. He filled all his vacancies with women and had no competition as other businesses had never even thought about this possibility. The ADF had a similar experience. They made the decision to allow mild asthmatics to join up and increased their potential recruiting pool by 400,000, after years of banning asthmatics.
Considering other candidate pools takes hiring out of a small box, opens up a whole new world of applicants (see X,Y and Z in diagram below) and gives a company a real competitive edge. While other businesses are still vying for conventional recruits, an organisation can fill all its positions with applicants its rivals have never even considered. Even better, because these people have been given a new and unlooked-for opportunity in their lives, they tend to be grateful, positive, loyal and committed to excellence to justify this uncommon belief in them.
Here are some examples of other demographics that organisations can target.
- School and college graduates – Graduates can fill entry-level positions and be trained in the skills required. For instance, the auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers announced in late 2007 that they were head-hunting high-performing 16-year-old schoolchildren because they could no longer fill their accountancy vacancies with university graduates. The ADF introduced a ‘gap year’ program, during which school leavers can come and work for them, in the hope that many will stay on. With a multitude of exciting roles to choose from, a $40000 salary and only one year’s commitment, this has proved a compelling proposition for many school leavers.
- Other gender or ethnic groups – Many organisations have restrictive rules that preclude some candidates. When the Victorian state police changed their fitness test from six minutes to six and a half minutes, they increased their female recruits from 26 per cent to 41 per cent. Similarly, an English language requirement maybe imperative for face-to-face positions but it’s not necessary for many manual jobs. In these a good attitude to work is the primary need.
- Mature workers – As baby boomers age, this group is growing. In the past, when wages were based on experience, older workers became more expensive to hire as they aged. Many older people are now more interested in flexible work hours and whether the role/company is a good fit with their personal values. The Australian state of Victoria bolstered police ranks by employing retired officers to work part-time on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. Home Depot in the US did a deal with the AARP—an ‘over 50’ association with 36 million members—and now sources most of the staff for its new shops from this pool.
- Overseas applicants – Ten years ago I would never have considered this an option. Increasing skills shortages now make overseas applicants a growing necessity. I’ve sourced engineers from the UK and boat builders from New Zealand. At the time, the cost of living in Australia was favourable and wages were higher so it was an attractive proposition for them.
- Boomerangs – Employees who have left an organisation and then return make great recruits because they already have knowledge of and share the corporation’s vision and values. The key to this is not to burn bridges at the time they exit. Have an open door policy so that good people who leave know they can come back whenever suits them. Professional service firm Deloittes recruits as many as one-third of all its new hires from boomerangs and saves the company millions of dollars in hiring and training costs.
- People already within the company. I love this category because it provides learning, variety and brightness of future for everyone within a corporation. There’s often someone within an organisation who can be trained into a position you’re trying to fill. One of my most successful recruits was Brian, a 19-year-old I employed as a CAD draftsperson after transferring him from his previous position in the IT department. He had no CAD skills but was positive, an excellent communicator and offered to share the cost of the course to bring him up to speed on the desired technology. We decided to give him a go. Not only was he fully qualified in CAD skills within six months but he eventually became one of the company’s most successful project managers because of his great attitude and interpersonal abilities.
- Role-splitting. In a tight labour market an organisation needs to ask itself whether it really needs to employ a person for a particular position. For hard-to-fill roles there are often parts of the job that can be performed by other recruits. In the US, a lack of teaching staff prompted the development of a lesser skilled Teacher’s Assistant position, which took on all the administration and reduced the number of qualified teachers required.
As human animals it’s not surprising that every recruiter has an inclination towards or against a certain type of person. In the current labour shortage however, this could be crippling your business. The greatest challenge for most employers lies in attacking their own biases and changing their own ingrained mindset towards winning the war for talent. Success depends on their ability to alter attitudes, and to carry everyone with them on the road to innovation. This battle within is the real ‘war for talent’. Waging and winning this war is what really counts.