Managers Struggle To Recruit The Right Workers

In order to build the best team, you need to recruit the best workers
In order to build the best team, you need to recruit the best workers
Image Credit: Stephen Douglas

In order to manage the best team, you have to have the best team. What this means is that one of your responsibilities as a manager is to use your manager skills to recruit the best team possible. During times when the job market is tight, this can be a real challenge.

Challenges In Recruiting Workers

When the job market gets tight, managers have to get creative when it comes to recruiting. This is especially true for both small and midsize companies. Managers at these companies are finding that they have to work even harder to both recruit new team members as well as retaining the team members that they already have. The good news is that there are options here. Managers can have their firms enter into partnerships with local unions or schools. Alternatively, some managers are getting their companies to pay for team member vacation costs, making internship programs more attractive, and expanding the company to geographical locations where competition for workers is not as great.

Internship programs can be a key way to attract new workers to your firm. These are often the programs that college students sign up for who may eventually go on to become full-time employees. In order to make an intern program more attractive, firms can have participants handle specific projects. Examples of such projects would be creating prototypes for new products or creating new training videos. This is in contrast to the filing and data entry tasks that interns generally get stuck doing. In order to make participating in an intern program even more attractive, some firms are offering a club or gym membership during the time that they are working as an intern.

So how big of a problem is the challenge of recruiting good team members? Currently two-thirds of small business owners are reporting that they are running into shortages of skilled workers. Right now 87% of firms have increased their recruiting efforts while 60% have taken the approach of increasing wages. This is also the time for companies to start to look into new manager training for coming up with ways of going about doing recruiting. The goal is to both attract and then retain the team talent that they are going to need. The thought is that if the job market gets tighter, they may have to get even more creative. Examples of creative thinking include firms that have started handing out US$1,000 bonuses to their employees to be used when they take vacations. This allows these firms to get more creative with their recruiting.

How To Recruit The Right Way

If a firm needs to attract more talent, one way that they can go about doing this is by starting an intern program if it currently does not exist. If they do have an intern program, then they can expand it in order to allow the firm to compete with larger competitors. Another way that firms can gain the interest of younger workers is to create for-credit classes that can be taken at their factories in such areas as manufacturing. Taking things a step further and creating scholarship programs that can help to cover the cost of tuition as well as providing paid internships can be a good way to get the attention of potential future team members.

Firms can also expand to new locations in order to attempt to attract the talent that they need. In order to find the correctly location, often times it can be a good idea to hire a consultant. A consultant can work with the company in order to find out what their specific needs are. The goal then will be to find an area that contains the right mix of people with a background that will make them well suited for working with the company. Most companies want to be able to hire local workers and then train them so that they will eventually end up remaining in the area. This is one way that companies can overcome the hiring problems that they may be currently facing.

There may be times that a firm will have to become proactive in its efforts to attract new talent. An example of this would be a firm that moved to a new area and then created a training program that it could offer on a regular basis with an established local organization. The purpose of these classes would be to provide the company with the ability to do some team building and identify the best potential employees that could be found within a class. Once these employees had been found, the company can then go ahead and work to recruit them.

What All Of This Means For You

Managers realize that the quality of their team is going to play a big role in how much they are going to be able to accomplish. This means that they need to make sure that their team is fully staffed at all times. A tight labor market means that finding the right people to hire can become difficult at times. Managers may need to become creative in how they go about recruiting people to join their team.

Small and medium sized firms appear to the be the ones where managers run into the greatest problems in recruiting workers. One solution to this problem is for the firm to enter into a partnership with a local union or college. In order to attract more potential workers, many firms are starting to implement intern programs where workers are given the chance to participate in projects. The tight labor market is making it hard for a lot of managers. They are starting to have to get creative in both how they attract new workers and how they then retain them. Creating for-credit classes that are offered at the company is one way to attract younger workers. Expanding the firm to a new location is another way to be able to get access to additional workers. Once in a new location, training programs can be offered to local workers and the best students can then be recruited.

Keeping a team fully staffed with high quality workers is not an easy task for any manager. As the labor pool gets tighter, it can become a real challenge to find enough workers to keep your team going. Managers have a responsibility to become skilled at recruiting. Take the time to evaluate your situation and then determine if some creative recruiting is what is called for.

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that managers can involve other members of their team when they are trying to recruit new team members?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So what’s the worst thing that could happen to you as a manager? The list of things could be quite long, but I think that we could all agree that finding yourself trapped in a job that you don’t like would have to be close to the top of the list. We can probably make this just a little bit worse if we made it so that you had just accepted a new job only to discover that despite your manager skills, you didn’t like it. What’s a manager to do if you find yourself in this unfortunate situation?