Job offers vaporizing! Candidates vanishing never to be seen again!

Recruiters and hiring managers are struggling to find the right candidates, and job seekers are accepting multiple offers, turning down one or more offers right before the start date.

I thought The Great Resignation would mean there would be a huge and highly skilled talent pool. That doesn’t seem to be how it is shaking out.

I was talking with a colleague in the UK and she said her company was trying to hire 50 full-time employees and couldn’t find them. This left HR looking for freelancers to fill in while their search for full-time employees continued. However, finding freelancers also was proving to be a big challenge.

This conversation left me scratching my head. There should be a ton of people looking. Where did all the good people go?

My clients working in contract positions are unsure if their contracts will be renewed, so they accept conversations with staffing firms about longer contracts at other organizations or full-time positions – even if their current contract has months left. (Full-time positions have the illusion of security and better benefits. You can’t really blame them.)

Why are they looking? Because they know that contracts can be canceled at any time. So, a contract is more like an intention vs. an actual contract. There are no guarantees and these professionals have bills to pay and people who count on them, just like you do.

Then, there was the verbal offer from a Fortune 500 company for a new high-profile initiative that never became a written offer. They strung the poor candidate along saying they needed additional approvals for a month before they finally acknowledged they wouldn’t be moving forward with the offer. I have never seen that before.

Another client received an offer for a great job, but the start date was a few weeks out, so for fun they went to interview for something that sounded interesting and was quite different from the offer they had accepted. Then, the start date for their new job got pushed out a few weeks, and if they receive an offer for the other job, they might take it. (You snooze you lose.)

So many organizations have been balancing the books with layoffs for the last two decades that employees know organizations are not committed to them, so why should the employee or candidate not be looking at better options?

I have to say some of this doesn’t sit well for me…

In order to attract and retain the best employees, organizations and small businesses need to start treating employees as people. Yes, hard decisions need to be made sometimes, but you can do it with kindness and compassion.

A little bit of that goes a long way toward generating good will and supporting a reputation as an employer of choice.

Be the place where people want to stay and grow.