This month’s blog and newsletter topic is “restoring personnel integrity.” This means retaining the right kind of personnel that will continue moving your company to success and restoring relationships with personnel so they’re retained.
Of course, retention begins with hiring the right personnel to start with.
The Scarcity
During the pandemic, a kind of compound problem arose.
First, because of stimulus and extended unemployment payments, people were actually being paid not to work. Many took advantage of this, left their jobs, and just didn’t seek further employment. This caused a scarcity of personnel—many companies scrambled to hire anyone they could find.
Second, also due to stimulus and unemployment payouts, many others chose to go ahead and retire. Talented, experienced people were then leaving companies, and once again businesses were faced with a scarcity of hiring candidates to fill those positions as well.
What Does Scarcity Cause?
Lack of personnel means that a company cannot easily accomplish its goals and make its targets. The pressure then comes down upon HR to find people, and qualified candidates being scarce, they’ll tend to make bad hiring decisions just to get somebody in the door and onto a particular job.
How does operating this way impact retention? The wrong hire on the wrong job won’t succeed, and therefore will not stay. The company is right back where it started, not to mention the damage can occur from such an unqualified placement.
Self-Inflicted Scarcity
Yet another situation has arisen recently, however—some companies are inflicting their own scarcities.
You may have heard of the recent rash of layoffs from tech corporations. Somewhat behind the scenes are the reasons for these layoffs, and the problems they are causing for the businesses engaging in them.
Certainly some of the employees laid off were not top-end employees. But many were actually excellent performers. I personally have observed—and was shocked to discover—a number of people who were 10-year-or-more veterans, who were highly productive, who were making or exceeding their numbers routinely, and who were then let go. These were executives making 150 to 200 percent of their quotas being dismissed.
Why would a company let them go? The reasons essentially had to do with salary. During the pandemic, government subsidies paid to companies meant they could retain the high-salary employees. But when the stimulus payments dried up, this was no longer the case, and businesses began laying off these high producers en masse because they felt they could no longer pay the high salaries.
Any company doing this then found themselves in the same situation they were in during the pandemic—a lack of qualified personnel.
Back in the Same Boat
Obtaining qualified personnel is then going to be doubly hard, because now the company has a reputation for being disloyal to long-term loyal employees who were, in fact, quite valuable. This is not the kind of culture that will attract highly qualified hiring candidates (see this month’s article on company culture for a deeper dive into that subject).
Additionally, long-term personnel who are still with the company, observing this behavior, no longer feel loyal to a company that is demonstrating disloyalty and will have no compunction about seeking employment where, again, the culture is more favorable.
Stay the Course
The answer is not to let a scarcity of candidates sway you from hiring qualified candidates. Also, do not dismiss loyal and highly productive staff who are in fact making your company money.
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