02B4F: Global Job Market Constraints

Wednesday Supermarket Steak

Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 823

Hiring people is hard. You have to figure out exactly what sort of person you're looking for when as you flesh out the job description, craft the job posting and start sourcing applicants. Then you need to filter through whichever resumes you get. Then you need to figure out who you actually want to interview or send an exercise to. Then you need to actually talk to these people and make an assessment of their character within maybe 30-or-so minutes. 

And you have to do all this over and over again until you find the person that feels most suitable for the role and you feel will most fit in with the rest of the team. Then you send your offer and cross your fingers and wait to see if the candidate is still as interested in working with you as they claimed to be during the interview process.

And after all that...you're still not sure if it's going to work out. You can only do so much during the screening process in the hopes that you find someone who will help the company grow and who will grow with the company in turn. Everyone likes to think they're pretty good judges of character to some extent, but sometimes you'll never really know.

Things have only gotten more challenging given how the pandemic and the rise of more remote employment opportunities has made the labor market a globally competitive space. So now you're competing against companies around the world, which makes for a very competitive space. And that makes hiring skilled talent even more difficult.

But the needs of the company won't disappear on their own, so we gotta keep chugging along. But it's situations like this that make outsourcing seem very tempting as you push hiring away to become someone else's problem. It can cost an arm and a leg (definitely more than if you hired someone yourself), but it does save you some time and theoretically, it'll mean you can get someone on board sooner. In theory.

Oh well. Two more work days in the week. 

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