Why You Should Always Be Looking For Employees

Should You Be Looking for Employees When You Are Fully Staffed?

Imagine that you need to fill ten positions. After an exhaustive year of searching (assuming you match the national average) you have filled them all.  Everything is done, right?  Well, not quite, recruitment never really ends.  The average employee stays at an organization for less than three years in the best situation; millennials even less at the start of their career.  Not a problem you think – unless you consider the employees who have already been at your organization for three years or longer.

Although hitting pause on recruiting would save your organization money in the short-term budget,  it would take more effort for you to start up a recruiting campaign again and get it to the level it was at before when the time comes to make new hires. It becomes a start and stop cycle for recruiting fresh talent and replacing employees. Surely that will be enough to solve any recruitment problem in the future right?  Wrong, recruiting for your organization is like launching a rocket.  The amount of effort needed to get it off the ground is exponentially greater than the amount of effort it takes to maintain it once it’s in the air.  In practical terms, it will cost you more to get your recruitment strategy back to where you were than it would to simply keep the recruiting process ongoing.

Why would you keep advertising for positions when you have them all filled? The answer is simple.  Once you stop promoting your organization through your recruitment strategy, you have to begin re-marketing to everyone that was once aware of your organization once you decide it’s necessary to bring in new hires.  You must remind potential job candidates of your value as an employer, give them a new lesson in your culture and convince them that they are the one for you.  This must all be done after not communicating with them for a while.  It is a case of “hey remember me, here is the same message I was using when we last talked a year ago.”  This inconsistency does not attract high quality talent. As a result, ideal talent for the organization passes you by.

This also forces your organization to pour a significant amount of additional of money, time and resources into repeatedly starting and stopping campaigns. This practice will continue throughout the life of the organization until someone finally realizes that keeping a campaign going is much easier, more cost-effective and less of a drain on resources than the constant change approach.

So keep looking for employees even when you have your positions filled to address churn in your business, tamp down costs and more effectively use resources.