This Job is Cursed! Four Tips on Filling That Impossible-to-Fill Opening

If you are struggling to fill your openings in this market, you aren’t alone. But if your job has been open for so long that it’s affecting morale, productivity, or profits – it’s time to get creative and reframe the requirements, responsibilities and/or benefits of the role.

1. Prioritize: Define what’s nice to have vs what you need to have. Sharpen that pencil and decide what you can live without and what you can’t. Modify the language of your postings, and think about how and where you are promoting your opening based on these changes.

2. Consider: Do you have time/resources to train for specialized or harder-to-find skills? Is it an option to hire for aptitude, personality fit, transferable skills, or other key strengths and invest more time on training and onboarding? If your location makes hiring challenging, can you offer flexible scheduling or remote work options? Can you raise your pay or offer more attractive incentives?

3. Explore: Have you thoroughly assessed your internal resources for creative solutions? Can you shift responsibilities among your team – hiring externally for the less critical (and easier to find) skills, and training an existing employee on specialized skills? It may be possible to promote a current employee into a hybrid role with more responsibility and outsource the administrative tasks.

4. Evaluate: Sometimes you simply need more time to hire the right person. Determine what the biggest source of “pain” is as a result of the vacant position. Can you hire to relieve the pain on a temporary basis, while conducting a lengthier search to fill your permanent need?

If you’ve already tried these and you’re still struggling, reach out. Advent has helped countless companies break the curse of the “unfillable opening”. Talk with one of our hiring experts to talk through a variety of solutions and strategies that could make all the difference.

 

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If you’d prefer to speak directly with a hiring expert at Advent, please contact our Director of Client Services, Michelle O’Kelly, for a free phone consultation.