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Whenever someone says, 'we have a staff shortage' I hear, 'we're not paying a high enough salary'.
by tlocke 4y ago
Whenever someone says, 'we have a staff shortage' I hear, 'we're not paying a high enough salary'.
- rightbyte 4y agoYe. Unless it is like welders or nurses we are talking about. Then you might have a shortage for not paying enough historically too.
- tzs 4y agoHigher pay usually can get someone to take the position, but if it does so by getting someone to leave their job at one of your competitors to fill your opening it has just shifted the shortage from you to your competitor. If you are in a competitive market and you were able to raise pay, your competitors will probably be able to raise pay too, and so they will also raise pay to fill their shortages. Someone will raise pay to be higher than yours and then you are the one gaining a shortage to provide a worker to fill someone else's shortage. Net short term result: you and your competitors still have shortages, but are now all paying more, and are possibly in a feedback loop that will continue to raise pay without fixing your staffing problems. You may have to raise prices, and then not only did raising pay fail to solve your staffing problems it increased inflation. Whether or not that is also the medium or long term result depends on how easy it is and how long it takes for the new higher pay in your industry to bring in new workers to your field instead of just shuffling existing workers between companies. Even if it does bring new workers to your field if those come from other fields it might be shifting the shortages to those other fields, which might then go through their own cycles of raising pay that only accomplishes shuffling shortages between them.