Understanding Your Team: More than Just Job Titles

What if being fully staffed isn't the panacea to your company's operational readiness? Buckle up as my co-host Mike and I tear down the commonly held belief that a fully staffed company equals a fully prepared one. We discuss the unpredictable nature of employment dynamics and emphasize that a successful business is one that stays proactive in its hiring process. We explore the notion of understanding roles on a granular level, dismissing the idea that job titles suffice in defining workforce capabilities. This kind of insight will aid you not just in replacement hires, but also in pursuing growth and expanding your team. 

Ready to rethink your hiring strategy? Join us as we draw parallels between recruitment and sales, urging companies to maintain an open mind and readiness to seize opportunities, either in revenue or staffing. While being fully staffed might give you a temporary peace of mind, taking a complacent approach to your hiring process can be detrimental in the long run. We challenge you to evolve your hiring practices, to be proactive rather than reactive and to understand your team beyond just their job titles. By the end of this episode, you'll have a fresh perspective on staffing and be better equipped to handle the unpredictable nature of business staffing needs.

We love to hear your hiring experience, whether you're a hiring manager with 100s of hires, about to make your first hire, or an applicant that has a story to tell. Share your stories with Max & Mike at hiringexperiencepod@gmail.com

This podcast and the matters discussed herein are for informational purposes only and should not to be construed as advice for a particular company or person. This podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional or legal advice.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

This is the Hiring Experience the podcast that helps you break down the art and science of hiring. Hosted by Max and Mike friends, founders and creators of rapid hiring, on a mission to bring an end to the resume, bringing you tactical advice to help you attract, select and retain the best talent. This podcast and the matters discussed herein are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as advice for a particular company or person. This podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional or legal advice.

Max: 0:37

Alright, so today we're going to talk about why being fully staffed doesn't mean you're fully prepared. What, what do you mean? You didn't want what's?

Mike: 0:51

funny? I don't know either. I'm just going to make sure that. So, like Mike said, being fully staffed is often presented as the end goal of any recruiting, hiring, anything you do to fill positions, and that once you've achieved that goal, you can forget about all aspects of hiring and your hiring process and things like that.

Mike: 1:24

This heavily applies to companies that are sub 50, maybe sub 100 people, that are not in the realm where they're large enough that just natural attrition and turnover for all sorts of natural causes can occur. And so we want to talk a little bit about why you want to still be proactive in your hiring process, understand that there's always going to be a time that you're likely going to hire at some point in the future and that, whether we like it or not, at some point somebody on your team is going to leave, and while people will talk about how, like nobody leaves anybody but good managers, that's really just not true. There's a lot of reasons people can leave. Life changes things, people move on, people move out of town or whatever. It is that we need to be ready to fill those vacancies and not be starting from scratch every single time, and so in that effort of preparedness we want to talk about what that really means.

Max: 2:27

Yeah, exactly.

Max: 2:28

And so being prepared doesn't mean that you understand that when a position opens you need to fill it, like that's not what the essence of being prepared is, right.

Max: 2:39

So sometimes you may not be a company where you have a lot, of, a lot of change over with your staffing and that's great I mean higher retention is awesome and people that are employed at your company for a long time is awesome and means you're building careers but, like Max said, people are going to move on for one reason or another.

Max: 3:00

So, especially in the situation where you're not doing a lot of recruitment or a lot of position filling or what have you, you might start to become or take a complacent mindset where, because you're fully staffed a lot of the time, you think that your hiring process is good or is optimal or what have you, and that's really not. It may be the case, but, like there's, there's also a line of reasoning where those two things do not relate. So being fully staffed and being prepared to staff aren't related concepts and I think that that's mainly based on just understanding that those people came into your, your company, from different avenues and they've been there a long time and your staffing process hasn't evolved because those people have been there a long time.

Mike: 3:54

Right. I think a really good example of this will come from companies that have been around for, say, 10 to 10 plus years, 20, 30 years, and there will have been a person in your position, say your general manager or an assistant manager, somebody who's been in that role now or been at the company, worked up to this role, been there for 10 years, has all of this knowledge in their head, understands what the job that they're doing is, but they decide to go leave, and so now, at this time, if you're hiring process is not prepared to fill that role, it's going to have a cascading effect all the way down your staff, and so when we start off with this is the same place we start off with any hiring process, and is that understanding what it is you're hiring for. And in a role with the world where you're fully staffed, we want to understand what the roles in our company actually are. What are the people that we are, thankfully, fully staffed with currently? What are each of them doing? And so, if the time comes in the future that they do leave, that you understand the role you need to fill and not the title that you're trying to now fill, where, as if you leave it up until the moment that they leave. You start off in a place and we talk about this often be covered in a podcast at some point in longer depth of just you start by hiring by the job title that they had when they left, not the knowledge and the skill and the actual work that they were doing.

Mike: 5:36

And so to have a good hiring process you out, we have to go back to starting what we want to fill first, and while it seems odd to do that while you are fully staffed, when you have a talking about, have that assistant manager or that general manager with that knowledge and experience walk out the door of what their job is, the experience can be recreated.

Mike: 6:00

People can learn new skills. It's not that you will never find somebody to fill that role, but it's Understanding what the role actually is on a day to day basis. That person may have been the only one who knew what they were doing every day, because when you also have the quote unquote a players that we've talked about already, that you perceive the intended kind of leave them alone, and what that means for yourself is it means you've delegated that responsibility, but it also means that we don't always know exactly what they're doing. While they're doing a good job, we need to know what that role actually entails. So, for a time in the future that you need to replace or fill that role, you are actually able to do so and not just fill the title slot itself.

Max: 6:48

Yeah, and I think that also plays into just a realm of reactivity versus productivity, right.

Max: 6:52

so in doing that as well, you give yourself growth opportunity, because just because you're not replacing a role or you don't have intention to, you can't be reactive when it is time to use what max is right getting you, but also if you have a deep understanding of every role in your company and you're hiring based on that, then, when it's time to pursue growth, you understand what roles you need, what positions you need to duplicate, based on what the function of the role is. So it may not be just about replacement, maybe about growth potential, pursuing different avenues and being able to you know replicate what those roles are and expand quickly into it right fully.

Mike: 7:35

staff can go from.

Mike: 7:36

You can go from being fully staffed and not fully staffed. Purely based on that, we want to grow our top line, or our bottom line, or or any part of your business, in a direction that's gonna require you to have more people than you have at this very moment. On that, we just we really like to touch on this because it is something we encounter when we're talking to people that we're not hiring right now, we don't foresee a need to hire any time in the future, and we tell them that's great, like we're Happy that companies are able to operate like that. We understand that it doesn't seem like the thing you want to do or spend time on, but at the same time and we're not saying to go spend a bunch of money on some new technology or anything like that you can do all of this with a word, doc. I'm just understanding all of the roles in your company from a day to day level and not a Job title level. So when the time does come that you are no longer fully staffed, you can actually act.

Max: 8:37

And we make. Why make a lot of references and allow some similarities between Recruitment and sales, staffing and sales and, you know, trying to treat them in the same regard. So trying to treat your recruitment and staffing process in the same way that you would treat your sales process at your company. So if you've hit your revenue goals for the quarter, do you close out any further opportunity to make more revenue? If somebody calls you with an opportunity and says you know we can, we can increase your revenue, is that? Do you say no because you've met the goal, or do you maintain an open mind and explore whether your company can pursue that Right opportunity or not? So all we're trying to translate here is she had that same mindset when it comes to your recruitment and your staffing always being ready To hire even when you don't think you're going to need to.

Speaker 1: 9:40

Thank you for listening to the hiring experience. We hope you enjoyed this episode and learned something new about the art and science of hiring. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast player. This helps others discover the show. Share with a friend, colleague or anyone going through the hiring experience right now. Share your hiring experience with us at hiring experience pod at gmailcom. Okay.