How to Hire in a Tight Labor Market

It seems that almost every week there’s another article in the news about how tight the labor market is. With so many opportunities for job seekers, recruiting and hiring pose new challenges for employers. How is it possible to attract great candidates when the labor market is so tight?

Before getting to specific strategies, let’s take a closer look at the current context and what it reveals about the future. How tight is the job market really? Are the headlines giving us the full story? As we’ll see, the picture is more complex and uneven — even within a booming market. So what does this mean for hiring, both now and in the years to come?

Four strategies for recruiting in a tight labor market

Though labor market conditions are more nuanced than the headlines suggest, employers still face a tight labor market. If you’re looking to hire, you already are — or will soon be — adjusting to this reality.

1. Pay people more: It’s what you’d expect an economist to say, right? When employers want to hire scarce workers, they’ll need to bid up the price sooner or later — which means higher wages. This is already happening: for eight months now wage growth is at or above 3% for the first time since before the recession. So: if you can do it, pay workers more. But don’t stop there.
2. Search more broadly: Cast a wider net, in many ways. In a tight labor market you might relax some requirements, such as a certain educational level or non-essential skills. You might look beyond the people you traditionally hire — such as hiring more women in typically male-dominated roles. Searching more broadly may also mean looking at different local markets, allowing people to work remotely, or being willing to relocate people.
3. Invest in employee training: If you search more broadly, you might not get the perfect candidate that checks every box you hoped. So, a tight labor market means investing more to train current employees and future hires — even though you might be hesitant to invest more in training since in a tight labor market employees are more likely to quit.
4. Invest in employee productivity: Finally, there’s another kind of investment that becomes more important in a tight labor market. If vacancies remain unfilled for much longer than anticipated, you might rearrange teams or rethink individual roles. You might also invest in technology to boost the productivity of the workers you have or to fill in for the workers you don’t.

Source : http://blog.indeed.com/2019/04/25/hire-in-tight-labor-market/