It's a seller's market for employees Words never before printed or even dreamed of in my lifetime by Bloomberg, June 5, 2018: “Job openings exceed those looking for work”! Like all news of plenty, there are downsides. In this case for anyone hiring who is looking for experienced and talented workers the availability of qualified help is very thin. It’s a sellers’ market. Good for employees and tough competition for employers. For small companies the difficulties in this kind of market are magnified tenfold. There is one absolutely common, huge problem for all entrepreneurs: hiring competent employees. There is almost no trauma our client’s have experienced that we haven’t. We’ve lost clients/customers money, we’ve been defrauded. We’ve had capital and borrowing problems. But none has had the power and effect of trying to hire good long term employees. The numbers are a cool objective explanation from a distance but nothing compares to the emotional and non objective toll a good or failed hire take on a small entrepreneurial company. When a company of 10 hires one employee, they’ve increased their work force by 10%. Boeing would need to hire 14,000 plus for the same effect, all on one day. We and our small clients have lost key employees and it's been enormously disruptive. We've hired some great employees and they've have an immediate positive affect. Our clients usually have fewer than 50 employees and their losing one key employee out of 50 is roiling. That is magnified tremendously as the total number of employees decreases. The one thing all of our thousand plus clients and prospects have agreed on over the past 25 years agree on is that finding reliable and productive employees is their single most nagging challenge. A friend who worked for several Fortune 500 companies in his 45 year career said the company he worked for with the best record of successful hiring (defined as keeping new employees longer than 2 years) succeeded 50% of the time. He claimed they were the best because they identified and removed the unsuccessful quickly, usually within 90 days. So large companies with full blown professional HR staffs are unsuccessful half the time in making good hires. Our conclusion is that the scientific method is the best in finding good help in small companies, i.e. theorize, test and measure the results. We’ve tried a variety of formal tests and worked hard to uncover who the successful will be by honing our interviewing skills. But we reflected that it’s best to do all those things, then hire on a trial basis only. The successful hires will reveal themselves, early, say in the first 3 weeks. Others will take longer but on reflection, we believe that you will know everything you need to know within 30 days. But even when you know, making a change is enormously difficult for the small company. Everyone is already fully occupied in performing the work of the company, not dealing with personnel problems and nobody wants to keep dealing with them. But it’s best to move on quickly when someone proves they will never work out and move on to finding the next candidate. I’d like to say we’ve been more successful than my friend’s low bar of 50% but like every entrepreneur we know, we haven’t solved the problem either, even after 25 years. And with all the good employment news it’s about to get much tougher for small companies to hire well. June's Feature ""Positive talk" has been popularized in professional sports, especially golf for the past 20 years. There are astounding anecdotes especially in sports. Sports psychology is an obviously very good experimental laboratory because of the tremendous rewards and penalties and the immediacy of the feedback from implementation of the theory. The current advice to succeed at going from negative talk to positive talk is following routines similar to physical training, always a challenge." - Trevor Morgan, CEO & Founder, Prairie Business Credit What Others Are Saying About Us "We have never seen such growth in all the past 35 years we've been in business. On our way to a banner year! We appreciate all of Prairie Business Credit's support in the past years to help us get here!" - President of Welding Company 25 Years Has Taught Us... After being in business for 25 years, financing over 500 companies, graduating 70% of them to be bankable clients, we have learned a few things along the way.
A business should focus on the things they do best. Most times, their expertise lies solely with the product or service they provide. For all the other things that a business owner has to get done, find qualified professionals to do it for you. A business owner's time is far too valuable to spend on things not core to their business or expertise.
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