STAFFING YOUR BUSINESS IN 2023

Stephen Borer, Partner, DMC Recruitment Group

As we settle into 2023, many of the staffing and recruitment trends in the industry have remained consistent with the previous ten years, albeit hiring needs are becoming more and more pressing.

Perennial Employment Challenges For The Industry

• Succession planning remains the number one issue for many businesses across the industry.

• Building materials businesses continue in their struggle to attract talent from other industries. Not because it isn’t a great industry to work in—but because by and large building materials businesses are not effectively selling the advantages, opportunities, and the stability of working within the vertical.

• Immigration is Canada’s best opportunity for population growth and the addition of new workers. However, experience has shown, the building materials industry is behind other industries when it comes to offering a diverse and culturally attractive environment.

The Last Few Years Have Added Additional Stresses To Many Organizations

• The booming market has led to intense competition for talent.

• Demands from staff have shifted to include work from home requirements, flexible working conditions, increased pay expectations and other demands.

• Staff and employers are feeling the long-term burn out related to both Covid and the consistent booming economy.

• Job Boards have struggled to produce candidates for job postings, they have raised their prices significantly, and the overall quality of applicant has reduced as they suffer from less active candidates.

2023 LOOKS LIKELY TO ADD MORE COMPLICATIONS TO THE MIX.

• Interest rates have risen and may continue to do so.

• Softening of some sales results when compared to the past 3 “boom years.”

• Talk of recession is damaging confidence in the market and is resulting in employer hesitation with their longer-term hiring plans.

• Potential candidates are nervous to make career moves, resulting in a tightening of the available talent on the market.

However, there is good news for organizations prepared to tackle some of these issues head on.

Actions That Could Provide Opportunity For Employers In 2023

1 Focus On Transferable Skills Rather Than Industry Experience

For every available candidate with building materials experience, there are a hundred without. Think outside the box and focus on the skillset they require, rather than the product knowledge, connections or industry knowledge. That can be trained. Hire the heart, train the brain.

2 Build A Talent Pipeline

Talent pipelining might sound like a term more suitable for Fortune 500 companies, but it is not. Talent pipelining simply means working on hiring employees that with solid training and investment from the business, can climb the ladder internally over time. Don’t fill jobs, hire talent that can grow within your business and allow it do so by providing the culture and support required.

3 Encourage Diversity By Changing Your Mentality

Immigrants often travel a different career path than we have traditionally seen within building materials. They might have less (often more!) education, they might not have had some of the opportunities others had when they were younger, they might not have the consistency you would see in Canadian resumes. But look beyond the resume and you will often find extremely driven, bright and articulate candidates with huge potential. You need to ask tough questions of your selection process and see if it biases certain backgrounds rather than competencies and characteristics.

4 Address Your Job Postings

A job advertisement is exactly that, an advertisement. Too many people post job descriptions. It is still a market that favours the employee, so you need to sell the opportunity. Sell the culture, talk about the career potential, sell the team, talk about the support and training they will get, tell them what makes your company great.

5 Engage A Specialist Recruitment Partner

Okay, I am biased. However, a specialist recruiter with deep networks in your industry is going to add value both when you absolutely must have previous building materials experience (please note above comments on this topic), or when you need a recruiter who can sell the benefits of working within the industry.

If the employment market does swing (and it does swing fast from favouring the employee to favouring the employer) then the market will become flooded by recruiters looking for new customers. These generalist recruiters will offer low prices, likely shorter guarantees (or non-honoured guarantees of any length), and will be starting from scratch on every search they conduct. You will waste a lot of time and effort “training” them on the industry.

6 IF THE MARKET SWINGS, TAKE ADVANTAGE

Warren Buffett’s advice is “to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” If the market does swing to being an employer’s market (where there are more candidates and less jobs available), it presents organizations the opportunity to attract and hire talent otherwise unavailable to them in other markets. Think long term, put great value on talent, it will be in short supply soon enough.

7 Have Confidence That There Are Solutions

Many of the owners that I speak with, particularly dealers, are only too aware of the staffing and succession planning issues that they face, but are unaware of the potential solutions provided by specialist recruitment firms. If you have no obvious successor within the business, a sale is an option—but it doesn’t have to be the only option. There are people out there with the capability to run a building materials business but without either the capital, or the risk tolerance to build their own.

The last 3 years have been extremely successful for the building materials industry, but not without challenges, particularly from a staffing and recruitment perspective. Don’t expect 2023 to be much different but do know that there are ways to mitigate those challenges with a strong talent strategy.