The Toll An Unfilled Position Takes on Your Employees

One of the worst things that can happen to your business is to be consistently short staffed. Whether you’re facing the “Perfect Labor Storm,” fighting high employee turnover rates or can’t afford to fill vacant positions immediately, a hiring backlog can reduce business productivity and put more stress on your current team of employees.
 
Most business owners under a staffing shortage assume the problem is the role itself. Unsure where to make improvements, they consider the starting pay, job duties, and reasons why previous employees may have left. Often, however, the issue lies in the recruitment process, as well as how the job is marketed to potential candidates.
By taking the time to evaluate your recruitment process and address any issues you may find, you are not just helping to fill one vacant position, but also finding a solution that could streamline your entire hiring process and increase employee retention and satisfaction in the future.

What Effect Does Being Understaffed Have on Your Employees?

When your team is understaffed, responsibilities and stressors can snowball throughout your entire business. Other employees must step up and handle tasks that previously weren’t usually their priority. While some companies may have the funding to hire a temporary employee, that’s not always an option, let alone a long-term solution. If the money just isn’t there, or the open position requires a particular skill set or is highly technical in nature, it can be challenging, costly, and inefficient to find someone to fill in temporarily.
 
With one empty position, the extra workload probably isn’t a hindrance to daily business activities. Everyone else can pitch in, splitting up the open job’s duties without taking on too much extra work. When you have several empty positions, however, the number of additional tasks each employee has to take on starts translating into multiple individuals needing to work additional hours to get everything done.
 
To juggle responsibilities, your employees might stay late, work through lunch and breaks, or sacrifice personal time. Others might claim, “that’s not my job”, and office morale will begin to slide.
 
Fatigue is likely to set in when employees have to work under these conditions. This leads to increased burnout, higher accident rates and more of them leave. Why not find a similar job, with similar benefits, but less work? Ultimately, a dissatisfied, unmanaged employee mentality can create even more vacancy within your company. As this cycle often starts to repeat, leading to issues such as being so understaffed you can’t open your store or meet deadlines. The first step to resolving these issues is to re-evaluate your recruiting process.

How A Business Partner Can Benefit You

Revamping your recruitment process can seem like a daunting task — and while outsourcing your recruitment process to an RPO may seem like an effective, hands-off solution, business partners can offer a more holistic, collaborative alternative to a single-service third party. You’ve hear the adage saying: “Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach him to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.” The guidance, insight, and coaching skills of experienced business partners will not only supplement your recruitment process, but further teach you how and where to make strategic improvements.
 
Many companies try to revamp their processes through their HR team. For smaller HR departments, adding recruitment strategies to their laundry list of responsibilities can be reversely unproductive. Further, while HR teams are innately a part of the recruitment process, this closeness may result in the oversight significant problems and makes being sufficiently objective more difficult.
 
With a business partner, you get an experienced team with years of experience regarding how to recruit candidates. Whether or not you have an HR department, business partners evaluate processes and tailor solutions that best fit a company’s needs; they can teach you how to find candidates who best align with your requirements, goals, values, and current employee platform. Making use of a business partner isn’t a way of eliminating your HR department. Instead, it’s a way to supplement it so that HR staff members don’t get overworked.
 
What do the members of a third party business team do for you?

• They teach you how to perform proactive candidate research.
  
• They train your hiring managers.
  
• They provide consulting services for HR technology and software.
  
• They handle reporting and help with audits.
  
• They map out the hiring process to make it more transparent to you and prospective candidates.
  

 
These are just some of the primary tasks an third party business partner can take on for you. Because every business’s hiring and recruitment needs are different, these teams will tailor solutions with each client to increase the efficiency of their recruitment process, align business and cultural values with prospective candidates, and ultimately increase a company’s retention rate and employee satisfaction. In the end, your company will become more efficient at hiring new candidates and better able to attract and retain high-quality employees.

Don’t Let a Stressful Situation Go on Too Long

Even if you only have only a few open positions, it’s not wise to make other employees stressed doing extra work. That will only lead to additional employees leaving and the morale of your office declining. If you’ve had issues for hiring good candidates in the past, it may be time to try partnering with a third party business solution. Having your recruitment process evaluated by professionals can help you improve the quality and quantity of potential candidates. Contact Lauber Business Partners today for more information.