Hiring Ideas

4 Winning Hiring Ideas for Today’s Tight Labor Market

With 6.66 million job openings in the United States and only 6.56 million people reporting that they’re seeking work, many of my clients, partners and colleagues are searching for hiring ideas and tips. Finding the perfect employee to hire for your business has never been easy, but lately it’s become a whole lot harder. For three straight months, the number of vacancies at businesses nationwide has topped the number of unemployed people, and this summer, the U.S. jobless rate hit an 18-year low (3.8%).

So, how do you hire the right individual when the labor market is tight? It may sound simple, but the key is to make sure your opportunity is the most appealing to candidates. Job-seekers today have different internal motivations and high expectations for companies.  What’s important is more than the pay rate for many – and almost all are looking for an empathetic and inspiring culture.

4 Ways to Win:

Keeping these four hiring ideas at the forefront, you’re sure to attract the right candidate:

  1. Timeliness: Ensure you have an extremely efficient recruiting process in place. Look critically at how long it takes you from posting, through interviews to offer letter. With more jobs than seekers, the best candidates will be attracted to the most responsive opportunity.
  2. Focus on outcomes: Evaluate key criteria for jobs and role behaviors. Be ready to lift educational requirements if they aren’t totally relevant to the job and determine if specific years’ worth of experience can be replaced by a person’s potential ability.
  3. Training: If you don’t have a robust training plan in place, now is the time to create one and see it through. In a tight job market like this one, you need to hire for a good culture fit, and train for success.
  4. Plan for the future: For every role you’re hiring for, you need to have thought through and documented a meaningful career path and share it during the hiring process. This will stand out to the candidate, and once hired, it will serve as inspiration for the job.

Implementing these hiring ideas will give you an edge that will allow you to efficiently and effectively identify, hire and train candidates who demonstrate potential success given the correct support. And remember, don’t find reasons not to hire someone, look for tendencies in which they might succeed!

Hiring Ideas & Resources to Consider

At KO Business Solutions, we have extensive hiring experience, working closely with our clients in a wide variety of industries to determine what their labor needs are, and how they can bring in the best candidates. We also deploy pre-employment tests and appropriate scorecard systems to measure key attributes.

With a documented scoring system in place, you will feel more confident in opening your search to a broader pool of people who may lack direct, relevant experience, but demonstrate the attributes that will make them productive in the role and a good culture fit. If you’re looking for hiring help, get in touch. We’d be happy to lend a hand.