How to Manage Hiring During an Unprecedented Worker Shortage & Resignation

As the Aviation/Aerospace Industry begins its speedy recovery from the last year, a familiar monster has reared its head: a shortage of qualified aviation personnel. While this issue certainly predates the pandemic, it has been compacted by workers leaving the industry during periods of shut down, as well as workers resigning in greater-than-usual numbers as operations return to normal.

This creates a delicate balance employers must strike – focus on retaining their current workforce, while also attracting new, qualified employees. Researchers have identified several areas employers can focus on to keep job satisfaction high among their current employers while ensuring they are still recruiting top talent.

For current employees, one of the biggest factors in job satisfaction includes a focus on their mental well-being. As employees evaluate what they want over the lifespan of their career, it is clear that employees crave consistency in policies from leadership while at work as well as empathy and communication; they also want a career that can offer them a good work/life balance. Consider what your company has in place to address these employee concerns, and take deliberate actions to implement changes if your company has been lacking in this area.

Employees also like to feel challenged and valued to their employers; offering your employees career opportunities beyond the role they were hired for shows that you have confidence in their abilities and have a genuine interest in helping them develop their career. Employees that are offered the chance to learn new skills or refine current skills through their employer tend to have greater job satisfaction and employer loyalty than those that are not offered those opportunities.

Attracting new employees is also more challenging than ever, and this issue can begin before a resume ever lands on the desk of a hiring manager. More employers than ever are using automated hiring software, which undeniably saves time on recruiters having to manually scan each applicant’s resume. However, research is showing just how fallible this software is – it is estimated that millions of qualified applicants across industries may be getting rejected by automated hiring software before the resume is ever seen by a human.

This leads us directly to the second largest hiring hurdle: job descriptions. Many job descriptions tend to be lengthy, detailed lists of requirements, and while this alone may discourage certain applicants from submitting their resume to a job, the main issue occurs when an automated hiring software meets an overly detailed job description: the software tends to reject applicants who, while more than qualified for the job, do not meet every item in the job description.

So what can employers do to mitigate these hiring roadblocks? Working with a quality, executive recruiting firm will solve many of these problems. Not only does an executive recruiting firm work to actively source candidates, rather than waiting and hoping the relevant candidates apply, they also write quality, industry-researched job descriptions, as well as review resumes of all applicants to check for transferable skills or other nuances that an automated software would likely miss. Of course, these efforts can also be made by your company’s internal hiring staff, and while it may be more time-consuming than an automated process, it may be worth the up-front investment if your company is not able to fill an empty position for weeks or even months.

There can be no doubt that the past year and half has changed the workforce, and in order to retain employees and hire new candidates, employers must be willing to change as well. And in a hiring environment as competitive as today’s currently is, even small changes can make a big impact to current and potential employees.

If you are a company looking for a direct-hire recruiting firm that understands the unique hiring needs of your company, click here to get more information.