What: McKinsey proposes a new approach to the talent shortage and how to overcome it.

Why it is important:  The “relaxers” persona they identified echoes a recent conversation between IADS CEOs: what is the former employees who left with positive relationship could be convinced to come back?

According to McKinsey, the talent shortage and race to recruitments are here to stay. Even though economies are reopening and consumer demand is high, in US, there are 11,3m jobs open in May 2022, vs. 9,3m in April 2021. It is estimated that the voluntary quit rate is 25% higher than in pre-pandemic period.

This is mainly due, according to a research they made, to 3 types of behavior:

• Reshuffling: employees are quitting and moving to another industry (48%) in some kind of horizontal translation,
• Reinventing: employees are leaving traditional employment to start their own business or look for other types of work structure,
• Reassessing: people quite because the demand of their lives and they step out of the workforce.

The consulting company advises to look at winning back nontraditional workers and proposes 5 workers personae in order to provide a new angle to recruiters:

• The traditionalists: career-oriented people who care about work-life balance but are willing to make trade-offs for the sake of their jobs. These are obviously the favorites of employers, however there are not enough of them to fill all the jobs.
• The do-it-yourselfers: people who value workplace flexibility, meaningful work, and compensation. They are usually 25-45 years old and value flexibility, meaning that employers have to embrace new ways of structuring the work, such as Airbnb who abolished the idea of location-based pay.
• The caregivers: they are people who have decided to stay at home for various reasons, and who are ready to lend their time and talents to companies willing to work with their schedules.
• The idealists: students and younger part-timers who are asking for development and follow-up from employers: mentoring, work-study combination schemes, career development plan…
• The relaxers: for them, career does not come first anymore. They are usually seasoned workers and might be interested in returning to interesting positions but at their own terms (especially in terms of meaning of work).

Facing the talent shortage: are you searching in the right place?