Of sheds and yogurt: there's just no help these days - difficulty of recruiting employees - From the Publisher - Column

Whenever someone failed to do an acceptable job, one of my former bosses would shrug his shoulders and remark, "You just can't get good help these days."

We've probably all said something like that once or twice. But today, we're more likely to say: "You just can't get any help these days."

In many parts of the country, it's a seller's market for job applicants, and some positions are going vacant for a lack of qualified- or interested-candidates.

Here are a few items from my personal inventory:

* For my birthday, my wife gave me a new tool shed for our backyard. The present included installation, promised within a couple of weeks.

That was two months ago. At this point, we still don't have an installation date.

Why? We spent a couple of weeks trying to make contact with the installer, a subcontractor for the hardware store where she purchased the shed. It took a couple more weeks to get the installer to visit the house for his site inspection. After a few more weeks we learned the contractor had decided to take an extended vacation in Europe. So we spent the next few weeks trying to get the store to locate and schedule an appointment with a new installer.

As I write this, installer No. 2 has done his site inspection - and apparently disappeared.

* Between flights recently I stopped at an airport stand for a cup of frozen yogurt. The stand was open, but no one was behind the counter. I could hear some, sounds from the back room, so I announced myself with a "hello."

After a minute or two I called a little louder, then a little louder. After about eight calls, each at increasing volume, a young woman appeared from the back room. "What do you want?" she asked.

"A cup of yogurt," I said.

"Yeah, well, okay," she replied.

She filled the cup sullenly, slapped it on the counter and turned away.

* A young woman I know, recently out of college, turned down two job offers last week because they weren't interesting enough. They didn't pay enough, either. She's confident something better will come along if she holds out for more excitement and a higher salary.

All of these stories have one major HR trend in common: They are direct results of the difficult recruitment market we're experiencing. The shed story: There's a building boom in this area and it's tough to find people to put up small outbuildings. The yogurt story: Employers may be willing to put up with shoddy performance if it means having a warm body to do the job. Fire that clerk at the airport and who knows how long it will take to replace her. The job turndown story: Why settle when there are so many jobs waiting out there?

For employers, the answers seem obvious, if not easy: Recruit the best and then work hard on retention; step up training programs to improve the service of the staff you've got; seek alternative recruiting strategies.

One strategy, hiring older or retired workers, is getting a long look at many organizations. For details, see Allison Kindelan's "Future Focus" column on page 200.

If your company is doing anything interesting or innovative to recruit or retain employees, we'd like to know. Please drop me a note at jadams@shrm.org. We'll print the best responses in a future issue.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Society for Human Resource Management
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group