After two long years of operating through a pandemic, businesses are facing yet another challenge – staff shortages. While we can optimistically look forward to fewer hospitalisations and deaths with Omicron, the reality is that lots of people are getting sick or having to isolate all at once. That means thousands of workers, just…gone overnight.
In Australia, shelves are emptying – there aren’t enough people to stack them, and with truck drivers off sick, there’s not much to stack them with anyway.
Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions Sally McManus spoke to the Guardian, saying the situation was worse than it’s ever been.
“We did have supply chain issues, but nowhere near, and the reason is because of the number of people who are sick,” she said.
To ease the shortages, the UK government has risked changing the self-isolation rules, from 10 days to just 7. In the United States, big box stores like Macy’s and hospitality giants like Starbucks are temporarily closing or limiting hours as a way to manage the staff shortage.
Understandably, even massive companies are taking that step – when you’re imagining a traditional recruitment process, filling tens or hundreds of empty shifts overnight seems impossible. By the time those new hires made it to the first shift, your permanent staff would be back at work.
Not to sound like an infomercial, but there is a better way. Sitting in your talent community are hundreds if not thousands of candidates who didn’t get a job the first time they applied, but would still make great team members. If you’re just looking for good-enough temp team members, you’ll find even more who suit. So that’s where to start – with the people who are already vetted and have already said they want to work for you. No time posting job ads or sifting through resumes.
But wait, there’s more.
Speed is crucial. If you can also filter candidates by location and availability (functionality you’ll find in our talent community platform), you can cherry-pick just those nearby who can come in tomorrow (or better yet, today). Pre-vetted people, nearby, who can start right now. That’s the way through.
Of course, finding people is one thing, but getting them into their first shift is another – you still have all the same legal hoops to jump through. Lucky for you, we live in the computer age. Our vSure integration sorts working rights processes quickly and automatically and our contracts feature lets you send bulk contracts in a few clicks. You can also update candidates via text. All those features put together have meant we’ve seen some candidates through the process in a blink of an eye.
For more advice on how we can help get you over the Omicron staff gap, book a demo.
