How Your Business can Leverage the Great Resignation
Is anyone not talking about The Great Resignation? No. But so much of the talk is focused on how employees and job seekers can leverage it. We think businesses stand to gain from The Great Resignation, if they are willing to take the risk of self-reflection and work of changing hiring practices. You already know what The Great Resignation is, so let’s just get to the important stuff: coming out the other side stronger.
Step 1: Know the Numbers
Many people are focused on the numbers of people leaving the workforce by choice. Many others are hopeful about the recent growth in employment. Both of these are valid, but it’s time to look deeper.
“Okay, Boomer,” wasn’t just a meme. Generational differences and opinions aside, it’s important to consider this generation and how it relates to employment. There was a Baby Boom after soldiers returned from World War II that lasted until the mid-60’s. The name of this generation tells us what we need to know: there’s a whole lot of people in that generation. A whole lot of workers. Some Boomers are retired and a wide swath will continue to in the next ten years.
After this boom, birthrates dropped and the next generation, Generation X, was born. Older Gen Xers are about 10 years from retirement. There are fewer of them than Boomers but most businesses will feel this departure.
Finally, the US has seen a 20% decline in births since 2007 (Econofacts).
Your first step: look at the ages of your staff to determine not just how many people you need now, but how many you’ll need in the next 10-25 years. This is vital to leveraging The Great Recession.
Step 2: Know What you Want?
Chances are, you’ve got a list of things you want in your business. It’s time for upper-management and C-Suite execs to pull it out and think about it through the lens of hiring. Between The Great Resignation, large numbers of retirements, declining numbers of available workers, and no impending Baby Boom, it’s time to project future employment needs and plan for them.
For example, do you want to hire legacy staff? How can you engage local colleges, universities, trade and graduate programs to hire new employees, some of whom will stay? Do you have programs, projects and software that require technical knowledge that’s becoming outdated? Where are Gen X candidates who have these skills but are likely to retire in the next 20 years looking for jobs? What language and work perks entice these two groups?
Step 3: Evaluate Culture
We get it, it’s uncomfortable, but now is the time to read those cringy GlassDoor and Indeed reviews. It’s time to pull out the notes from exit interviews. Start three lists: one for positive comments, one for neutral and one for negative comments. When something is repeated, put a tally mark next to it. You’ll quickly discover what employees appreciate, don’t care about and dislike about working at your company.
If you just rolled your eyes, you’re not thinking big picture.
People have needs when it comes to employment and if you want to survive The Great Resignation, The (upcoming) Great Retirement and declining birth rates, you have to celebrate the things you do well and sit with the feedback.
If you notice consistent complaints about management, focus on trainings, seminars and workshops to help them improve. Include goals for improvement in reviews.
If you notice complaints about lack of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, talk about this and figure out what you can do to be better. We’ve included hiring-related tips at the end to help.
If you find consistent praise about a practice, for example time-off policies, keep them as is.
Most importantly: if you notice overlap in water-cooler complaints, staff meetings, reviews and exit interviews, fast-track those. These are the problem areas you have to fix to retain staff.
Sit down with your core values. Does the feedback align? Hiring without taking a culture temperature check isn’t going to benefit your business.
Step 4: Redesign Your Hiring Process
This is a nice way to say: scrap your current hiring process. The one-size-fits-all, “what’s your biggest weakness?”, transcript scouring of yore is completely outdated and, honestly, pointless.
Once you’ve gone through steps 1—3 you will have an idea of what you need as far as staffing and positions, where you’re doing well, where you can improve.
Create personas: these are ideal employees. Think about them honestly. What do you need from a skills, attitude and human perspective. Then create job descriptions for positions that make sense based on a smaller talent pool (retirements and declining birthrates!) and create a list of what you want to know before hiring each one. Individually. Develop your hiring process for each job based on these and you’ll be better-equipped to rebuild a workforce that is likely to stay.
Step 5: Implement Inclusive Approaches
Everyone has bias.
Fact: you picture Mike Jones differently than you do Konstantina Papadopoulos.
Fact: the thing that makes you picture these people is front and center on their resume.
Solution: have someone not on your hiring committee (administrative or support staff) remove information from resumes and cover letters that could make people form biases early. Here’s our recommendations for what to remove and why:
First and last name. These can indicate biological sex or gender identity. They can also paint a picture in someone’s head of the candidate.
Address. An apartment number, a far away city, a particular zip code… all of these can create biases. Where someone lives should not make a difference.
Years. It’s pretty easy to calculate someone’s age based on graduation year and job history. And speaking of graduation years…
Schools/Education. It’s time to recognize that not everyone has to go to a 4-year university to be an exceptional employee. In fact, that trend for quite some time has been to attend community college for 2 years before transferring to another school once the student has a better idea of what they want to be. 4-year universities are also expensive and present barriers to access state schools may not. Take them off the table and evaluate candidates based on their abilities, skills and experiences (without years of experience).
Certifications, Licenses and Degrees. Sure, there are certifications, licenses and degrees needed for certain jobs but they wouldn’t be invited for an interview if they didn’t have these things.
Final Thoughts
The Great Resignation isn’t going anywhere. It’s also not a death knell. You can leverage it by using it, retirements and declining birth rates to your advantage to assess, take stock and change hiring practices to create a business that thrives during challenges. We know this work is uncomfortable, so why not book a corporate virtual wine tasting for your C-Suite, hiring team or new hires?
