Dan Kennedy says the labor shortage is real: workforce participation is at a 40-year low. Businesses can't find plug-and-play hires anymore, so they need to hire trainable people, broaden who they'll consider, and sometimes cut services. A dental office lost its manager of 19 years and couldn't replace her.
The only thing we could do is limit our output. Right. Voluntarily. It's a real problem. The first thing I talk with clients about with this is, and you said it correctly, particularly in this situation of a shortage, they have to give up on the idea of finding good employees. Sam.
Hello and welcome to this month's Masterclass. My name is Darcy Juarez and I am here with Dan Kennedy. And Dan, you've told me that for your current private clients, those that are coaches and niches for their tribes of business owners, staffing has moved its way to the top spot of frustration, pain and difficulty, displacing advertising, marketing and getting customers and selling. And I certainly hear this too. So what are you telling your clients about finding good people?
So their experience is, is as you described and it is one of two labor experiences of the moment. It is either the complaint that we can't get good employees or we even can't get any at all. Right. I just saw Catalina Island. The resorts on Catalina Island, California are now, they're open this summer for five days only, so they're closed to two days a week. And they've greatly cut the restaurant menus. And you don't get your room cleaned every day. So you have to be staying for longer than three days for there to be main service to the room. They just drop off stuff which is happening in the hotel industry, you know, a lot. But this is not a, these are not, you know, La Quintas. These, these are pricey resorts. And the, the CEOs answer is hrs because we can't get people. And so the only thing we could do is limit our output. Right. Voluntarily. So it's a real problem. There was some thought that it would go away pretty quickly after the lockdowns and the widespread fear and the having to wear masks. But that has not, you know, be the case. So the first thing I talk with clients about with this is, and you said it correctly, particularly in this situation of a shortage, they have to give up on the idea of finding good employees because what they're thinking about is that they're going to get a ready to go person that is like bringing home a lamp from Home Depot and they are going to plug it in and it is going to light up and it'll be a good employee, like a good lamp. Right.
And.
That, that might be doable when you had an enormous supply of people looking for a finite number of jobs. We have the exact opposite. So we have, you'll hear a lot about unemployment number being good percentage and about job Creation being good. The number they don't like to talk about much is we have the lowest workforce participation number in 40 years. So we. Which said, which translation. Because there's all these open jobs, we have the highest number of people choosing not to work in 40 years. They just aren't available. They are not reporting to anyone. There's some are understandable reasons for that. They're aging out, they're retiring, they took early retirement when confronted with the virus situation and they're not coming back out of retirement. They're doing gig stuff. So they're doing three, four gigs and they're happy to just have their bills paid by Wednesday and play video games until the following Wednesday. But whatever the reason, the actual pool of available staff employees is the smallest it's been in 40 years. So you're not going to go to Home Depot, get one, bring them home, plug them in and they're going to be a good employee. It's a unicorn hunt. And so you have to think in terms of finding good people, finding a good person with some evidence that they can be trained up, coached up to perform in the position you have. I would in one of previously in the, one of the other master classes I started to talk about, I have a client right now who's been dental office and they've had that office manager for 19 years and she's leaving for no reason other than she don't want to work anymore, period. So they now have a candidate. So they're starting to fill this position and. They're very smart people. But I cautioned them the other day that their starting point premises are all bad. Right. So A, they are looking for a candidate who will be a good office manager, which by that they mean ready to plug in, right. And replace this one that is going bye bye. Well, assuming that that one has been performing well, she's been there for 19 years and she has a lot of what she does internal by attitudinally and aptitude that no candidate is going to have. Right. Then I said to me, molest their hunt. This position's very hard to define and describe because she wears so many hats. And I said if it's hard to define and describe, it's going to be impossible for anybody to perform. Right? Yeah. So but this, this, this is, you know, the idea, right, that a lot of people have is they're going to go find a good employee, whereas the achievable goal is that you're going to find a good person that you can turn into the good employee for this position. And most small business and even mid sized company positions that are being filled are not like oh, I need another heart surgeon. It's not that they have to have a prerequisite set of specific technical skills to succeed in the position. Right? So we can broaden our idea of what we're going to start with.
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