If you feel like you can’t find good employees, then you’re probably frustrated by settling for mediocre talent.
There are plenty of reasons why you might not be finding good employees, and many times the issue lies within your hiring process. If your job descriptions lack clarity, or if you're prioritizing hard skills over the right soft skills, you're likely attracting the wrong candidates from the start. And a historically low unemployment rate means the talent pool shrinks even further.
At The Metiss Group, we specialize in helping companies refine their hiring strategies and develop future superstars. This article will show you the reasons why your hiring process might be flawed and will show you strategies to improve.
You can’t find good employees because you’re not clearly defining the role
The most common reason why hiring managers can’t find good employees is because they lack clarity around the role.
It sounds obvious, but many hiring managers struggle to identify what they actually need in a candidate.
Many will over-inflate what they want: for example, they’ll post “master’s degree required,” hoping to attract more bachelor’s degree candidates.
Others struggle to distinguish between which skills sound good and which are a true necessity. We once had a client say, “Our new hire needs to come from a SaaS company.” But if you’re not hiring a programmer, why should that matter?
Or if you hire a candidate just because you like their dominant extroverted personality — maybe the two of you get along, but if the role requires someone who is steady and compliant, then they might actually be a bad fit.
So if you find you’re struggling to find good employees, the first step is to clarify what you need in the role. Look at hard and soft skills: which are a must-have, and which are a nice-to-have?
As a result, you’ll screen candidates you actually need. And you’ll stop wasting time with candidates with great resumes who don’t fit the role.
Historically low rates of unemployment make it harder for you to find good employees
Another reason you may be struggling to find top talent? Historically low rates of unemployment. In other words, there aren’t enough humans looking for jobs.
See the graph below, which shows unemployment data as far back as 1948 from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Besides a quick spike from the coronavirus pandemic, unemployment rates have remained below 5% since September 2016.
And when unemployment hovers around this number, companies start hiring the unemployable.
Job openings have increased while unemployment has remained low, which puts the country in a worker shortage. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, there are 85 workers for every 100 open jobs in the U.S.
This means hiring managers might see fewer superstar candidates when they post a job opening.
It also means that companies are frequently asking people to lead at an earlier stage of their careers — a 2017 study found 38% of American workers report to a young leader. There just aren’t enough seasoned leaders searching for jobs.
These young workers try their best to catch up to speed, but companies also aren’t prioritizing leadership development. Two of every three millennial workers report they aren’t receiving enough leadership development opportunities.
You may feel too impatient to train them, but if your leaders aren’t growing along with your business, you could be missing out on thousands of dollars in lost productivity.
You need to hire for the soft skills
There’s nothing we can do about the unemployment rate and labor shortage. So you need to ask yourself: what’s the minimum skill level you can hire? And then, how can you develop them to where you want them to be?
It’s time to start hiring for soft skills — not just hard skills. Check out our Candidate Selection Matrix:
Look, we get it. Everyone wants a “Current Superstar.” Someone who ranks high in both hard skills and soft skills. But they’re often hard to find, and they’re expensive.
You can go ahead and cross out the “Unqualified candidates:” those who lack both hard and soft skills.
It’s the next category that’ll get you in trouble: “Future Headaches.”
These are the candidates with a rock-solid resume, but they come up short in the soft skills. For example, we once saw a candidate who graduated from Harvard, had traveled the world, and had plenty of relevant work experience.
On paper, he was a perfect fit. But his assessments revealed that he was someone who lacked stress tolerance, optimism, and other key emotional intelligence traits.
When hiring managers see this candidate, they think, “I can deal with the other stuff. I just need someone who can hit the ground running.”
But it’s incredibly difficult to take a candidate from “future headaches” to “current superstars.”
You’ll have much better luck in the top left quadrant: future superstars. If someone is a great fit in the soft skills and meets the bare minimum requirements in the hard skills, you can train them to become a superstar.
The bottom line about why you can’t find good employees
If you’ve been asking yourself, “Why can I find good employees?” It's time to look in the mirror and evaluate your own hiring process.
Without clearly defining the role and learning how to train for the soft skills, you’ll throw away thousands of dollars each time you fail to attract and retain top talent.
Now that you understand why you can’t find good employees, it’s time to learn the difference between traditional recruiters and The Hiring Process Coach™.
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