Damien Soitout
Hire when candidates are scarce by reading a labor series and keeping the standard. The market is not a town.
A handshake is the end of a hire. The work before it is the same when candidates are scarce.
When good people are easy to find, a sloppy process hides inside the crowd. You can miss three candidates and still meet a fourth on Thursday. When candidates are scarce, the same sloppiness shows. You rush. You lower a standard you meant to keep. You call a legal status a shortcut. You tell yourself the market made you do it. I am writing on 23 January 2023. Hiring changes when the labor market is tight. The change is in your patience and in what you offer. It is not a permission slip to skip the work of a real hire.
I am speaking as an operator who has had to fill seats. A small firm in a city and a small firm on a back road feel the same panic when the person they need is not in the inbox. Panic hires a charming stranger by Friday and then spends a year undoing Friday. Scarcity is a reason to be clearer. It is a poor reason to be faster than your judgment.
The seat, if it is real, can already be a line on the year you just closed. I described that page in “Close the year on one page.” An open role belongs under what is still open: the work the person would do, the date you need them, and the standard they have to meet. If you cannot write that line, you are not hiring. You are lonely for help, which is human, and which produces bad offers. Write the line before you write the advertisement.
Scarcity is easy to mythologize. A neighbor says nobody wants to work. A headline says the opposite. You need a series, not a proverb. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, JOLTS, at bls.gov/jlt. It is the monthly and annual set of estimates for job openings, hires, and separations, for the country and with figures for states. Read the release that is current on the day you hire, including the note on what the survey actually measures. Openings are not the same fact as hires. Separations include quits and layoffs, and those are not the same fact either. A market can have many openings and still be a bad market for the specific skill you need, or a tight market in general and a loose one for your role.
Use the series as the scale. If openings are high and quits are high, your candidate is also someone else's candidate, and your current people are also able to leave. That is a different world from a slack market in which a posted role draws a crowd. You do not need me to invent a local count. You need the public series, and then the honest count in your own pipeline: how many people you spoke with, how many could do the work, how many you would trust with a key. Three weak conversations are not a shortage of character in the young. They may be a shortage of clarity in the role, or a pay offer the series would have warned you was behind the market.
The International Labour Organization frames the wider duty on its page for employment promotion. The work there is about employment policy and about decent jobs, not about your vacancy. I want it in the conversation because scarcity tempts small operators to treat “decent” as a luxury for firms with a human-resources department. A short staff is not an excuse for a muddy wage, a dangerous corner, or a promise you do not mean. Decent is the floor under the offer. The ILO page will not write your advertisement. It will stop you calling desperation a philosophy.
When you need someone on Monday, a contractor arrangement looks like speed. Sometimes it is the right structure. Often it is the structure you picked because employment felt slow. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service puts the question in the title of the page: Independent contractor (self-employed) or employee? Read that page for the tests it applies. Do not borrow a friend's rule of thumb and call it compliance. The status changes tax, control, and what you owe the person if the work continues. A scarce candidate does not become a contractor because you are in a hurry, and an employee does not become a contractor because the word feels lighter in a message.
Ask the operational question beside the legal one. Will this person use your tools, keep your hours, and do the work the way you direct, for as long as the seat exists? Then you are probably looking at employment, and you should let the IRS page discipline the probably. Will this person deliver a defined result, with their own method, for more than one client, and then leave? Then a contract may fit. Write the scope in sentences a stranger could enforce. “Help us out for a while” is how scarce markets manufacture disputes. The while ends, the help has become a job, and nobody agreed what the job was.
The lesson is the pause. Scarcity argues against the pause. Take it anyway. A week spent reading the status is cheaper than a year spent repairing a status you guessed.
The lists you already need are on their own pages. Scarcity did not invent a new list. Hire slowly, fire fast is the method. Slow means you know the work, you meet the person more than once, and you check the claims that matter. Fast, on the other side, means you do not keep a clear mismatch out of kindness once the evidence is in. Scarcity makes slow feel unaffordable and makes fast feel cruel. Both feelings are expensive. A bad hire in a tight market is worse than a vacancy, because the bad hire occupies the seat the right person would have taken, and the team spends its scarce energy compensating.
Where the people come from is ideas for sourcing candidates. Use that page rather than a rumor that “there is no one.” Sourcing in a tight market is mostly memory and reputation: people you already respect, people they respect, and a public description of the work that does not waste a rare applicant's evening. A vague post attracts vague replies, and then you conclude the market is empty. The market answered the post you wrote.
What you offer, when you cannot win on volume, has to be sayable. How to attract good people and keep them is the longer account. In a scarce season the short version is enough to start. Say the wage range. Say the hours. Say who they will answer to. Say what is hard about the job without turning the hardness into a personality test. Say what you have actually changed since the last person left, if someone left. Candidates who are scarce are also informed. They can smell a firm that wants a hero because it will not fix the week. Investing in how people are is part of the offer, not a poster you add after they join. If the week is built to break a person, the labor series will keep showing you quits, and you will keep calling it a mystery.
Firing is the sentence everyone wants to skip when replacements are hard to find. The criteria belong in when to fire an employee. Scarcity does not retire them. Keeping someone who harms the customers or the crew, because you fear the empty chair, is a decision to make the chair worse. You can hire slowly and still end a mismatch. The fear of the empty chair is rational. It is not a reason to leave a known harm in the seat. Write the harm down. If it meets the standard you already set for ending the job, end it, and reopen the line on the year page.
Read the current release. Write the line for the seat. Decide the status with the page that governs it. Meet the person more than once. Then shake hands. The work before the handshake is the same when candidates are scarce.
