Talent shortage solutions: Embrace the next-step workforce

By Karl Ahlrichs

A few decades back, I worked in outplacement and was involved in thousands of terminations. This experience led me to question why certain individuals had been hired in the first place. My passion for effective recruiting is based on this history.

Hiring-process flaws

The flaws were obvious: Organizations did not define their values, align their job descriptions with their future needs or pay attention to the behaviors of their high performers. Addressing these key points is crucial in solving the current talent shortage.

Now we’re ready to hire using an accurate workforce roadmap that is aligned with your organizational strategy. This approach enables building a workforce tailored to the organization’s next steps rather than its history.

Thoroughly assess candidates

If an organization plans to purchase a $500,000 piece of equipment, it will thoroughly assess whether it will meet future needs and benefit the organization before buying it. However, companies routinely hire staff and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on salaries and benefits without conducting a comparable level of advanced assessment. The hiring process must refrain from relying on individuals’ hunches, gut feelings and first impressions, as these subjective methods are flawed and unproductive.

The impact of poor hiring decisions

Due to poor hiring decisions, managers spend significant time bringing underperformers (about 16% of the workforce) up to average performance levels. Unfortunately, they rarely dedicate effort to motivating the top performers (also about 16% of the workforce), even though top performers are responsible for most of the organization’s productivity.

Identify top-performing qualities

Therefore, it is essential to review job descriptions, identify the qualities and values shared by high performers in each role and seek these attributes in new hires. Qualities that generally define top performers include:

• They learn quickly and discern what’s essential and what’s not.
• When they make mistakes, they take personal responsibility. When they succeed, they acknowledge everyone who helped them. (Low performers tend to do the opposite.)
• They have a sense of humor that defuses stress and conflict in the workplace.
• They fit in with the team.
• They are not actively seeking work but may be bored in their current positions (often because their managers fail to give them sufficient praise and encouragement).

A back-to-basics step in solving the talent shortage is to identify top performers, focus on retaining them and hire individuals with similar characteristics to these high performers to support future organizational goals.

Rethinking traditional practices

Hiring practices have changed little over the past 40 years. To achieve different results, the process changes must begin now. Traditionally, the hiring process starts with applicants submitting résumés and applications.

High performers often lack up-to-date résumés because they are employed and not actively seeking new opportunities. Poor performers, on the other hand, frequently have up-to-date résumés. Therefore, a hiring process that requires an up-to-date résumé weeds out top performers unintentionally.

Applications provide little information beyond demographics. Résumés—potentially enhanced by AI tools—enable the writer to withhold or manipulate information freely. An HR professional may conduct a brief phone screening to verify facts but gather little new information before scheduling an interview.

Although an interviewer may determine within minutes of starting an interview whether an applicant is unsuitable, they likely devote at least 30 minutes to the interview to avoid hurting the applicant’s feelings, wasting both their time and the applicant’s.

Most hiring managers assess candidates in depth by the second interview. However, this assessment tends to focus solely on the candidate’s skills and abilities, and insufficient time is devoted to determining whether the candidate’s values and attitudes align with the company’s purpose. A reference and background check may uncover some information, but the candidate’s actual behaviors are usually only fully revealed after they are hired.

Implementing change in the process

Our back-to-basics changes in the process add goals and structure to the talent pipeline. While strategic planning is traditionally done first, I recommend doing it third for a good reason. It is crucial to identify and protect high performers first, and upskill managers to be ready to engage the new hires who will come. Next, we will reconstruct the hiring process to yield better outcomes.

I repeat the question I used to begin this series: Are you willing to change how you hire, manage and spend more quality time with high performers?

Karl Ahlrichs is a national speaker, virtual facilitator and author. He has decades of strategic HR consulting to all industries, using risk management and organizational development theories to bypass “best practices” and move directly to “next practices.”