The Labour Shortage Affects Everyone

The Associated Press reports interesting hiring data from ADP, the payroll processor, how small businesses in the United States are conducting their hiring processes.

You can read about the details here but the trend is clear: a labour shortage is looming. Managers react to it differently. Some choose to adapt to the changing circumstances. Most choose to ignore staffing related concerns and put a pause on hiring, waiting for the labour pool to increase.

This has lead to a somewhat paradoxical current situation where the demand for labour is increasing while hiring is slowing. That can not last for long as a tipping point will be reached when firms can no longer hold back on hiring and a stampede on already scarce talent will follow. What will you do then?

Further evidence from Britain

This trend of an increasing labour shortage is confirmed by Bullhorn, one of the leading global recruitment software providers. The results of a survey done amongst their users show that talent shortage is the top challenge for recruiters (52% say it’s a top priority).

In a separate report regarding hiring trends in the UK Bullhorn also reports dramatic year-over-year growth of 59% in demand for temporary staffing in the UK. Which will in a year or two likely translate to a talent shortage in fields where lack of workers has never been a problem previously.

The shortage can affect your firm

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Already over a year ago farmers in the UK rang alarm-bells about the lack of farmworkers. The local council authority in Cornwall warned back in 2017 that crops were rotting in the fields. The Independent further reported that since the Brexit vote up to 2017 staffing levels for farms in the area had dropped to 65% of their normal requirements.

More recently, this August, the BBC reported of a study done by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development which found that besides well-known issues in staffing for the healthcare and hospitality sectors that became even more critical after the Brexit vote there are other areas affected. IT, transport, storage and construction industries in the UK are being squeezed by the tightening labour market.

Alex Fleming, president of staffing at Adecco states: "With Brexit looming we're seeing a talent shortage and a more competitive marketplace. "In this candidate-short landscape the pressure is on employers to not only offer an attractive salary, but also additional benefits."

A call for reconsideration

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Consider your current HR and workforce toolset:

  • Does it allow to get more out of existing employees for now?

  • Does it hinder any new forms of work you want to embrace?

  • Does it offer an attractive user experience to your workers?

There maybe other solutions that offer all 3 but we have built PARiM to offer it at a large scale to retain a huge labour pool of staff and sub-contractors that you filter, mix and match by qualification, proximity to work location to fit each shift. We see from data and experience that labour pools are the future of workforce management.

When you are ready to change your employee management solution, feel free to try our solution. What makes us attractive for most future forms of work is our cost-effective pricing model where you pay per shift hour

However, it is the final point concerning user experience is perhaps surprisingly the most unheralded aspect of modern work: consider that most of your workers interact with your company through the tools you offer for management, communication, scheduling and accounting.

Stop paying expensive consultations fees for cliché advice on employee engagement and taking on expensive employee branding projects - simply offer your managers and workers better tools like PARiM and HR KPI's will sky rocket. Let's get going today with a free demo.

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