Yes, you read that title correctly.

 

Over the years, I have found that well-run companies with an employee centric culture hire me far less than companies that don’t.

 

Having said that, even if you’re managing in an effective fashion, there are definitely times during the hiring process when a certain expertise is required that nobody in the company possesses. Those are the best times to call an experienced search consultant and enlist their services.

 

So what happens when you’re NOT managing effectively? In a nutshell, you’re not acknowledging and rewarding some of your most productive employees. As a result, they leave and create a skills and knowledge gap.

 

Do you still need a recruiter in such a situation? Yes. Could you have avoided that situation? Absolutely.

 

I recently attended a very engaging training session by Scott Ferrin at a Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) meeting. During that session, he presented some rather daunting data, including the following:

 

• According to the U.S. Labor Department, there will be a gap of seven million people to jobs in the next 10 years.
• Over 75 million Baby Boomers will begin retiring during the next three years.
• Approximately 10,000 Baby Boomers turn 65 years old every day in the United States.

 

As I listened to the presentation, all I could think about was the fact that the same advice Scott was giving to employers about how to keep their best people . . . correlates directly with the reasons I hear that employees want to leave their companies.

 

NOW is the time to establish a fully integrated talent management program. To that end, carefully consider the following questions:

 

Do you have the right people in the right positions?

 

Do you actively participate in succession planning? Are the employees that you have targeted as your future leaders been properly trained to step into these roles?

 

Do you have creative leadership development programs? Do you talk to your staff and see what THEIR career goals are? Are you helping your employees reach those goals?

 

Are you adapting to the current times and allowing for family-friendly and flexible work environments?

 

I can tell you from many years of experience that well-run companies with an employee-centric culture do not have to call their staffing vendors nearly as much as those organizations that haven’t adopted such philosophies.

 

Which means they don’t have to hire me.