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Hiring the Right Employees for Your Practice
Smart managers are rethinking the impact that the employee shortage will have on the way they do business in the next decade. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, there will be a 25 percent population decline in the 24-34 year old age group and a 15 percent decline in the 35-44 year old age group in the next decade. Thriving companies understand that this population trend is already making recruiting, training and retaining employees a challenge that requires the use of more competitive strategies to ensure business success.
If you think those percentages are insignificant to your business, think again. The 1970s oil shortage was caused by only a 5 percent shrinkage in worldwide supply. Compare this to a 15 to 25 percent people shortage and the picture is clearer. These numbers are alarmingly high and will affect most employers.
There is some good news, however. Generation Y, the demographic group entering the workforce during the first decade of the 21st century, may mirror the baby boomers, who entered the workforce in the 1970s and 1980s -- with several distinct differences. By 2005, 85 percent of the new workers were women and minorities.
What will this mean for business owners and managers? Preparing your business to recruit and retain employees will require very different strategies and an acute understanding of different cultures, needs and priorities. Not only will the faces of new job candidates look different in the next 50 years, but the dearth of entry level employees in today’s market indicates there will be a scarcity of qualified people to manage and supervise entry-level employees in the future.
What Businesses Should Do to Prepare
1. Learn to recognize good people when you see them. In an issue of Harvard Business Review, only 16 percent of senior managers were confident they could identify the differences between their high performers and low performers. As a result, managers really don’t recognize good people when they apply or when they are leaving. The first step in finding good employees is understanding what motivates the good employees you already have, and whose performance meets or exceeds your expectations. Identify why their behavioral style blends in your workplace, what values they share with you, what expertise they possess, and how much potential they have to grow. Once identified, look for those characteristics and values in future employees.
2. Create the “Irresistible Business,” a super-pleasing culture that attracts the best customers and employees. The challenge for thriving businesses will be to market their business to prospective employees as the best place to work, just as businesses market to customers as the best place to buy.
3. Introducing poorly motivated employees into a workplace of competent, skilled people can be devastating. How motivated do you feel when you are surrounded by people who are not motivated? Mixing productive employees with under-performing “warm bodies” only demotivates the workforce and feeds turnover. Select employees who fit your culture, share your values and have a positive attitude. Hiring “warm bodies” just to fill open positions is a very shortsighted mistake that only exacerbates the problem.
4. Your business’ most valuable asset is your employees. How much would your business be worth without the employees working in it? Microsoft is now the richest company in the world and their biggest capital asset is knowledge and information created, controlled and dispensed by employees. Smart business owners and managers are now including human resources on their financial statements as an asset, not an expense or liability.
5. Invest in your employees. Current employees are your highest probability prospects for growth. The return on the investment of training the right people can be as high as 10 times greater than investing in capital improvements.
6. One of the most efficacious things a manager can do is match people with jobs that call upon their skills and compliment their behavioral style, motivations and values. Making a good job match requires managers to possess detailed information about their employees. Pre-employment and professional development assessments are not only cost-effective, valid and legal, but also a prerequisite for protecting your human assets and your bottom line.
Hiring and selecting employees the way “we’ve always done it” will threaten the future success of many currently successful businesses. Managers who continue to make hiring and retention decisions based on old methods and ignore the impact of employee shortages, risk limiting their growth and failing to reach their potential in the future. Today’s employers have two choices -- either keep drilling in the same shallow “people wells,” or create a workplace that attracts the best candidates to come to them like water flowing downhill.
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