How to Manage Great Resignation and what are the challenges ?

To understand the implications of the Great Resignation, one must first try and trace the root cause of this phenomenon. Certain sectors have always seen above-average attrition, such as customer service and sales. Others like education or healthcare typically see longer tenures, with employees rarely changing career direction. So, what’s changed in 2021?

During the pandemic, the global rate of voluntary turnover reached an all-time high of 3% — this is across industries, across regions. What’s even more interesting is the employee demographic impacted by this phenomenon. It is employees between ages 30 and 45 years who witnessed the highest increase in resignation numbers. Turnover in this group jumped by over 20% between 2020 and 2021, while between the 20–25 age group the increase was only marginal.

This leads to two inferences:

● There is greater market demand for skilled and experienced labor. There are more opportunities for those who have been in the workforce for 7+ years, and they can command higher salaries.

● A lot of the Great Resignation can actually be attributed to the Great Reshuffle, a trend explained by BBC as an overarching reconfiguration of what our worklife looks like. Those with desk jobs are eager to explore more rewarding (if high-risk) terrain, while frontline workers in retail, health & fitness, and healthcare may switch to desk-based jobs for security.

In other words, the average employee — with the right mix of skills, talent, and experience — now knows exactly what they want, and isn’t afraid to pursue it.

What Does This Mean for Recruiters?

For recruiters, there is both a challenge and an opportunity. It is difficult to hold onto top talent in such a volatile labor market, and candidate conversion rates are also likely to dip unless you have an extremely truncated time-to-hire. On the other hand, the quality of hire is likely to go up as candidates now have more open job opportunities than ever and will zero in only on the ones that are the most meaningful.

Some of the trends that recruiters can expect amid the Great Resignation include:

● Borderless hiring — Candidates will expect the flexibility of remote work, and will consequently apply to jobs outside their residential towns and cities. This provides recruiters with a much larger candidate pool to work with.

● Transferable skill sets — The number of candidates applying to a job with zero industry experience will increase. This doesn’t mean that they are ill-suited to the role — instead, recruiters have to look for transferable skills that could apply across industries and job verticals, as a real measure of talent.

● Faster time to hire — As candidates go through more job opportunities, recruiters with the fastest time to hire will be able to close the top talent. In 2022, it is unlikely that an experienced candidate will be open to waiting for weeks for a response from a prospective employer.

● Employer branding — Amid the Great Resignation, a large number of professionals will join companies outside their city or the immediate network that they are unfamiliar with. Recruiters must act as a stand-in for the employer brand and culture to engage and convert these candidates.

Throughout all of this, there will be a greater reliance on HR technology to bridge the gap left in the absence of physical interviews and in-person candidate interactions.

Anticipating and Addressing 2022’s Recruitment Problem

Despite a promising labor market, there are a couple of problems that recruiters can expect in 2022. To begin with, candidates will still be in the process of finding their feet after multiple waves of COVID-19, economic turmoil, and career ups and downs. This makes it difficult to engage candidates in a meaningful way and ensure retention in the long term.

Second, bulk graduate hiring may regain momentum in 2022. Simultaneously, there is a need to effectively replace any mid-career (30–45 years old) business executives who might have left during this period. This translates into an extremely busy recruitment calendar, and possibly greater demand than supply.

To address these, here are my recommendations for 2022:

● Focus on culture and employee engagement — It is best if attrition-related recruitment needs are kept to a minimum, as experienced employees are always more costly to acquire than they are to retain. Here, recruiters must work closely with other stakeholders involved in the employee experience.

● Ramp up investment in HR tech — The hiring and onboarding process will continue to be digital, for the most part. Recruits from other locations will need careful hand-holding through a well-articulated candidate engagement blueprint.

● Reconfigure job descriptions — One of the most highly recommended ways to hire talent in a targeted manner is to use Success Profiles. This lists the behaviors, strengths, abilities, experience, and technical skills needed to succeed at a particular job, instead of describing what the company or the manager is looking for.

With this in mind, HR will play a crucial role in business success in 2022, helping to connect dynamic organizations with the brightest minds out there. Watch this space for my next article on this topic, exploring the need for career pathing technology.