Open to Hire? 5 Ways to Deal with a Staffing Shortage

By Elena Klitko - October 21, 2021

If your company is experiencing a staffing shortage, you’re not alone. Fox Business reports that nearly 70% of businesses worldwide are being affected by staffing shortages, and the current situation isn’t likely to resolve itself any time soon.  

I am the HR Business Partner at Customertimes, and since I’ve worked in recruiting and talent acquisition for most of my career, I have some insight that can help companies – especially software, tech, and IT companies – fill in critical talent gaps.  

Here are the top five ways to deal with a staffing shortage right now and in the months ahead.  

The Top 5 List 

1) Invest in an internship/mentoring program.  

This actually works in two ways:  

Hire interns

If there’s a shortage of resources on the market, hire interns. The recruiting time and cost is minimal, and while you will be investing in their training, you have the advantage of getting to know your interns and determining if they have the talent to be offered permanent positions once their training is complete.  

Obviously this is a long-term solution. If you need staff right now, you may not have the luxury of waiting to hire the people who complete your internship program. But even if it won’t meet your immediate staffing needs, investing in interns now will protect you from shortages in the future. Some of our most successful Salesforce developers and architects started with us as interns and worked their way up.  

Upskill your existing team

At Customertimes, everyone is paired with a mentor. They meet regularly with their mentor to discuss the next steps on their career path, and as an organization, we help them find the trainings and certifications they need to get to the next level. This approach helps us avoid skill gaps.  

For example, when we know we will have an opening for a Marketing Cloud Consultant, we can ask our mentors who has expressed interest in the tool, and then help those people get the proper certification. Without our mentoring program, we wouldn’t have access to that information, and we’d spend a lot more time trying to hire externally.  

2) Review your time-to-hire. 

Don’t lose talented candidates to companies that have a faster, more efficient hiring process! In my experience, an overwhelming hiring process can scare people away very quickly. If you can’t tell if the person will be a good fit in 3-4 interactions, your process is wrong and should be revisited. 

3) Revisit your hiring plan. 

Define the business problem you’re trying to solve, and make sure it will actually be solved by hiring. You may discover that you don’t need so many resources after all. 

Also, rethink your location requirements. Customertimes embraced a remote-work model long before the pandemic necessitated it, and one of the reasons is that it enables us to hire the best person for the job, regardless of location.  

Is there an outstanding Salesforce Principal Architect in Ottawa, CAN? Great! We’re going to hire them, even if our closest office location is more than four hours away in Toronto.  

Open up your location requirements, and you’ll find that the talent pool gets quite a bit deeper.  

4) Make smart tech decisions. 

Your tech solutions should improve efficiency for your existing teams. If you don’t have – or can’t find – the people you need right now, find technology that makes life easier. 

The CT Mobile suite of products is designed to improve the efficiency of sales and field sales teams by streamlining order taking, visit planning, store audits, and more, so they can get more done with the staff they have on hand.  

Look for something similar for your industry. There’s a good chance that many of your processes can either be automated or improved with the right tech platform, cutting down on your immediate hiring needs. 

5) Hire a staff extension service in the interim. 

I work in HR, so I know that hiring is time consuming and expensive. And for many tech companies, if you don’t have staff ready to go, you have to turn down projects, which means you’re turning down valuable revenue. 

The best solution in this case is to work with a partner organization and share talent resources. It gets you the help you need without the time and expense of hiring, meaning you can say “yes” to projects while taking advantage of the partner organization’s expertise.  

If you’re currently trying to fill in gaps at your organization, we can help! Customertimes Staff Extension Services offers expert help for business-critical projects. We are trusted by Salesforce Professional Services to provide staff for their projects, and we can provide Salesforce Industries (Vlocity) Developers, React Native Developers, DevOps Engineers, UI Developers and more. Learn more about it here, or contact us with any questions.  

Customertimes has more than 15 years of experience as a global SI and PDO partner. Internationally recognized as a Salesforce Master Navigator, we are laser-focused on delivering unprecedented business results. 

Visit us at www.customertimes.com.