After running lean due to fears of an impending recession, your team is burned out and your recruiting efforts are going nowhere. What would you do?
It’s been nearly 20 years since you were named general manager of your company’s newest location. While there have been ups and downs, you’re proud of what you and your team have accomplished, for the most part. The one part you’re not proud of was the mandated staff cuts when the Great Recession hit. You remember disagreeing with the corporate office, but the decision was made, so you did what you had to do. Letting good people go for no fault of their own is a memory that you never want to relive.
Ever since then, you’ve intentionally run lean. While this decision led to more overtime, it allowed you to remain fully staffed each time the economy slowed. Your team members weighed in and let you know they were 100% onboard. “If I have the choice of working extra hours for time-and-a-half, or having new people to train in, I’ll take extra work and pay,” they said.
For the past year or so, economic experts have been making headlines with dire predictions about an impending recession. The constant drumbeat that the sky is falling has made builders hold off on starting new projects and made you even more cautious about replacing a couple of key team members who retired. After all, the last thing you wanted to do was to hire some new people, then have to let them go once a recession reared its ugly head.
Fortunately, interest rates and inflation are beginning to drop, and the prophets of doom are less insistent of a looming recession, and business is picking back up. With things turning around, you finally decided to fill those vacant positions, but it looks like you may have waited too long. Despite offering a competitive pay and benefits package, you’re getting very few applicants for your open positions.
As sales rise, you’re seeing increasing levels of burnout in all areas of your business. The days of your team members being grateful for overtime are gone. Instead, you’re seeing fatigue, frustration, and stress. Your assistant manager, who hasn’t taken any time off for months, said, “I’m worried that we’re going to start losing some of our best people if we don’t give them a break and bring on some more help.”
You see now that your determination to avoid letting people go has backfired, and it’s critical that you onboard some capable pros quickly. But with few applicants for your open positions, time is running out. What would you do?
Poach. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Do whatever’s necessary to hire pros away from your competition. They know your business, and they can hit the ground running.
Adjust business hours. Until you’re fully staffed again, adjust operating hours to fit the staff you currently have.
Call corporate. Reach out to the head office and see if they can transfer employees from other locations, even if only temporarily to give some relief.
Change your focus. Hire for attitude, train for aptitude. Maybe you can’t find an experienced pro, but training someone with enthusiasm is better than an empty seat.
