The war for talent, the great resignation and other myths

The world is very much at the tail end of the Covid-19 pandemic. Business optimism is high (regardless of what you hear in the media), organisations are growing, and candidates are back to being active in the market and looking for new opportunities.

There has definitely been a cultural shift in the way people are looking at their careers and the way they wish to be engaged with their employers. Working from home, working part time, telecommuting and contracting versus permanent employment are not new phenomena. However, the zeitgeist has definitely changed as more and more people want these alternate arrangements rather than the traditional Monday-to-Friday, nine-tofive employment model.

These trends were definitely happening pre-Covid, especially with improving internet speed and availability, virtual meetings over Zoom and Teams, and other technology. It’s just that the pandemic and resulting lockdowns and travel restrictions greatly accelerated candidates’ desire for change. However, the fundamental recruiting environment remains largely the same as it was 20 years ago when I first started my recruitment career, especially the excuses for poor hiring and retention, so let’s dispel two of these right from the get-go.

Myth: the war for talent 

When I first started working in the recruitment industry in 2002, I joined TMP Worldwide (now known as Hudson). At the time they were the biggest recruitment company in the world, and I was excited about joining such a prestigious brand. I clearly remember, in my very first days of induction, being introduced to this term of doom and gloom, ‘the war for talent’, designed to spread fear among employers and to lower their expectations regarding the quality of candidates they would see on a shortlist presented by us.

It’s not dissimilar to a real estate agent manipulating homeowners into accepting a lower price for their house, because ‘it’s a buyer’s market out there’ so the owner should be grateful to receive an offer at all. It amazed me that recruiters basically sold a service by pre-emptively conditioning employers to be underwhelmed. More importantly, that’s exactly the level of service they then delivered. On the other hand, I believed (and still do) that as recruitment professionals, we must be able to guarantee to deliver outstanding shortlists, which requires a headhunting approach. At my firm Arete Executive, unless we deliver a shortlist within 20 working days that our client is delighted to interview, we offer to refund our client their retainer. If we say we can deliver the result, we should hold the risk of non-performance.

It’s 20 years later and I still hear about the ‘war for talent’ on an almost daily basis, from CEOs and business owners, HR managers and internal and external recruiters. Quite frankly, it’s a load of BS and the fact that it is perpetuated is just an indication of how dumb and lazy most people charged with recruitment are.

Rather than working harder and smarter to attract outstanding candidates, it’s so much easier to just blame the market and accept mediocrity. Let me give you a couple of examples. Earlier this year my recruitment company was engaged by one of the biggest mining companies in the world to recruit for them an HR manager in regional Australia (I won’t tell you their name, however if you think about the top three Australian global mining companies, it’s definitely one of them).

Now this particular mining company had this role vacant for close to eight months, and the fact it remained vacant was causing a lot of distress to the line manager as it was significantly impacting their ability to do their job and deliver results well. Yet the head of internal recruitment, who was responsible for finding candidates and filling the role, had not delivered on what was a fairly simple brief, even after such a long period. The excuse – ‘it’s a war for talent’ – was there were no suitable candidates in the region, or who wanted to move to the region. They had essentially given up, while still paying lip service to some continued sourcing activity taking place.

Eventually, the line manager was given permission to engage us to deliver a suitable shortlist, which we were able to do in less than two weeks, that resulted in a very fast and successful placement. Why were we able to get such an immediate and positive result? Because unlike the internal recruiter who simply placed a bland and uninspiring advertisement on Seek and sent a few lacklustre InMails on LinkedIn, we undertook a comprehensive sourcing strategy that left no stone unturned.

Myth: the great resignation 

How many times have you heard this phrase in the last couple of years, especially in our post-Covid world: ‘It’s not my fault we can’t retain people – it’s the great resignation’? It’s as if everyone drank the Kool-Aid while working from home, and woke up hating their boss, hating their employer, hating their profession, and all wanting to quit and join the circus.

‘Especially the younger generation, who want the world and show no loyalty to their current employer,’ complains the older senior executive while talking to me about looking for a new job and an extra $100k. Ahhh, the joys of hypocrisy. In 2010, a global poll conducted by Gallup uncovered that of the world’s one billion full-time workers, only 15 per cent of people were engaged at work. That means an astronomical 85 per cent of people were unhappy in their jobs.

The average professional job tenure in Australia from 2000 to 2022 has consistently sat at around 3.0 to 3.5 years. This means that people change employers roughly every three years. A recent PwC report on the ‘great resignation’, ‘What Workers Want: How to win the war on talent’, found that 38 per cent of Australian workers intend to leave their current employer during the next 12 months. Which is, guess what? A tenure of about 3.0 to 3.5 years. So the more things change, the more they stay the same.

There is no great resignation, it’s just media doom and My simple explanation is this. During Covid there were a lot of people who wanted to change jobs, however chose not to do so because they felt the risk of change at that time was too high. ‘What if I change jobs and then get Covid, but don’t have any accrued sick leave or annual leave?’ Or, ‘What if I change jobs and then my new employer is negatively impacted by Covid, and I end up being made redundant?’

So they stayed in jobs longer than they would have normally because it was a safe harbour in a storm. Now that Covid is largely behind us, these people are resigning for new opportunities. Covid was just a bottleneck and now the employment market has returned to normal. The statistics prove this.

I can honestly say I have not had a single regrettable loss from my business in over five years. Likewise, I know countless CEOs and business owners who have been able to retain all their top performers both during and post Covid. They have invested time and money into building their brands as Employers of Choice, and in maintaining a performance-based culture that encourages and rewards exceptional individual and team performance.

Just like the war for talent, the great resignation is a crappy excuse for poor leadership. The great news is that you are going to learn how to build and maintain a culture to not only attract high performers to your businesses, but also to retain them for much longer than industry averages.

Other myths and clichés 

There are so many other myths around recruitment, leadership and retention that I could write a whole book on this subject. Then there are the clichés that seem to be repeated in every business book, such as, ‘strategy eats culture for breakfast’ (Peter Drucker), or ‘start with why’ (Simon Sinek)’, or even ‘courage over comfort’ (Brené Brown). In their time, these ideas were thought-provoking and challenged some old business paradigms, but they

just seem a bit naff now through endless regurgitation (a bit like Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up – thank you Ted Lasso for being such an awesome TV show). How about we just learn some simple tools and then go out and kick some butt?

Written by Richard Triggs.

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