I got a little peeved recently. So unlike me.

An experienced recruiter, steeped in self-pity, opined, “All that’s happened is we have swapped the disaster of no jobs in Covid to the disaster of no candidates as we recover”.

And then he started to launch into a little bit of ‘woe is me’ and ‘it is so unfair’ before I intervened.

I know there are now almost universal skills shortages. In Australia and New Zealand it spans pretty much all sectors at all levels. My son, who works in a pub while at Uni, says they are offering $1,000 sign-on bonuses just to get a new bar person to start!

Of course, it is a challenge. I am not minimising that.

But trust me on this, and never forget it, please.

When it comes to ‘recruiter headaches’, candidate shortages are not in the same universe as job shortages.

You will grab ‘candidate short‘ over ‘no jobs‘ any day of the week, in any year, in any century.

Plenty of recruiters need a mindset shift.

Candidate shortages are nirvana for our industry!

If candidates were easy to find, why would clients come to us? It’s the whole reason for our existence.

Your new mantra needs to be that “candidate shortages are excellent because my differentiator is that I know how to find them, and I know how to bring them to the hiring table, and I know how to manage the process through to offer and acceptance.” ***

That’s the very essence of our value!

That’s what our fee is for!

That’s why clients will use us!

It’s simple. If there are massive talent shortages, and that is where the pain in hiring is, your job is to become a world champion at finding candidates and managing them through the process.

Don’t whinge about it. Celebrate it! And master it.

It’s not easy, I know. But if it was easy, all the lazy and incompetent people would be rich. Right?

So, hone your talent acquisitions skills, your candidate engagement tactics, your influencing, advising and creating outcomes tool kit.***

(Understand too that your particular experience of candidate scarcity might be some historical candidate service chickens coming home to roost)

And celebrate with my friends down at Ivory Group who got this same lecture from me last week.

*** Of course, if you do not have these competencies, you are ‘diep in die kak’ as we used to say in South Africa in my youth and no doubt they still say now. Look it up. It’s Afrikaans, a very expressive language in the key emotional moments.

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