The "Better to be safe than sorry" strategy causes businesses to put a hold on hiring and inadvertently stunts business growth in the process. Business leaders overcorrected for an economic dry spell and instead of hiring more, many firms are opting to simply avoid the risk of hiring at all. Others have taken a different approach, however, and are seeking candidates who know the ropes but lacking in experience. This strategy has spurned new opportunities for those who have been laid off from their careers to start anew since they typically bring a wide range of entrepreneurial experience with them. More than ever before, employers are on the lookout for what these forgotten skills may offer their companies.
What does Overcorrecting look like?
While it may seem obvious, the text is not always so plain to see when things go sideways. Overcorrecting has a tendency to stem from our beliefs and the belief that past experiences tend to predict the future and in turn our beliefs cause us to make judgements. We start to make assumptions like “because we are in a pandemic my business is doomed to fail.” We adopt a mentality of we have done it before, and the immediate response can be to do exactly the same thing again, even if it didn't give us the outcome that we wanted.
3 key tools to help with workforce planning
Interview candidates with full understanding of company needs
Like many businesses out there who deployed the stop, drop and roll strategy, ultimately the time will come where you will need to hire again. Approach your hiring strategy by looking at the people versus the skills. People that can cope in this kind of type of environment. People that are ok with a little bit of ambiguity, ok with a little bit of uncertainty.
Approach your hiring strategy with an open mind and one that encompasses the full business. Don’t pigeon hole a role to a specific candidate, as recruiters we are having to articulate people's transferable skills a lot more to our clients, as often the mindset is one role, one candidate.
Give yourself some breathing room
While you may not have implemented your next hiring strategy, you and your team need the space to be able to do so. Consider bringing on a temp or contractor to provide you with that room while also taking some of the pressure off your team while you work on longer term solutions.
Team Wellbeing
With hiring freezes in place and less staff, the pressure begins to fall on those who are still within the business. You end up with a team bursting at the seams with the workload and ultimately resulting in burn out.
That slow burn(out) will have a huge effect on employee wellbeing and you will need to act quickly to ensure that it does not leave you in a worse off position. This also erodes your employment value proposition(EVP) and ultimately making it difficult to engage new talent. Here at Tribe, we have partnered with Groov to lead our workplace wellbeing.
