How HR Practitioners can Recruit in a Changing Job Market

Blog by Lisa M. Sanchez, Founder and CEO, JustDigIn2It LLC

To reach Lisa, click here: https://executivehrconsulting.com/consultants/justdigintoit

With the baby boomers aging out into retirement, proactive steps are needed now by businesses and human resources leaders to address an anticipated job shortage in the coming years and decades. This, coupled with the fact that birth rates have dropped, according to recent data. These factors will have a direct impact on our workforce and available talent.

There are several ways to address the changing demographics and a shrinking labor force:

1. Data-driven decision-making: HR leaders should pull workforce demographic data to determine what percentage of the workforce is expected to retire and by when. This data will allow for short- and long-term staffing solutions through succession planning and replacement charting strategies. Employees can be identified and developed to fill key positions and leadership roles.
2. Retention strategies: COVID introduced a new way of working. It’s an “employees’ job market” right now. Employers should reimagine how they recruit and retain talent. Demanding that people work in cubicles and offices for every single job is shortsighted. Certain jobs can be more flexible and performed from anywhere. As a retention strategy, this may be appealing to those considering retirement. Perhaps a part-time job is more suitable than losing institutional knowledge when people retire.
3. Promotion pipeline: Employers should invest in regular and ongoing learning and professional development for their employees. Doing so creates job enrichment and expansion opportunities to upskill, increase experience bandwidth and stay abreast of the latest trends, practices, and technologies. When well-qualified current employees are ready for promotion, this can be an effective strategy to avoid the high cost of recruiting and onboarding new hires.
4. Assess business practices and processes for efficiency and effectiveness: Work that is performed with old tools and resources or manually must be reviewed. In the short term, a job analysis or audit can help understand what is being performed and how. It can also determine work duplication and redundancy. In the long term, this will inform the type and number of jobs that are truly needed, thereby staffing lean but effectively. As people retire, some of these jobs may not need to be replaced.  This is an opportunity to use artificial intelligence (AI) to simplify complex tasks, automate mundane and repetitive work and streamline and improve workflow. While AI can lead to job displacement, it can also create opportunities to use “human” talent for customer-facing, creative and oversight roles that are better served with personal face-to-face contact.

Now is the time to get ahead of what we all know is coming. As baby boomers retire, we must have strategies in place to fill those positions without delay, to ensure the preservation of institutional knowledge and to maintain business operations without interruption.

About Lisa Sanchez:

Founded in July 2021, JustDigIn2It LLC is a life/career coaching and HR consulting company. The Founder and CEO, Lisa M. Sanchez, MA, SPHR, SHRM-SCP, CPLC, has 28 years of Human Resources (HR) management and executive leadership experience. As a thought leader on organizational culture, Sanchez folds into her practice the values of ABIDE – access, belonging, inclusion, diversity and equity – to ensure that the “whole person” approach is connected to business decisions, HR and organizational strategies, employee experiences and workplace engagements.