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O P I N I O N
Your firm’s collective strengths can and should be applied to make your new employees’ onboarding a standout experience. Who is responsible for onboarding?
Y ou see it in the headlines every day. “The great resignation,” “the talent wars,” “the big quit,” and other catchphrases. Is it media-fueled nonsense, or is there a real problem facing companies looking to hire? After more than two years of COVID challenges, the answer is abundantly clear: There is a hiring crisis taking place – not just in the retail and hospitality sectors but across the board, including the AEC industry.
Kraig Kern
According to the government’s job report released in January 2022, more than 20 million people (about the population of New York) quit their jobs in the second half of 2021 alone. Looking at LinkedIn’s data on who is leaving jobs is most compelling: Millions of baby boomers are retiring early, but millions of Gen Z (people in their teens and early 20s) workers are also exiting the workforce. Many more women are leaving than men. All the groups AEC firms need to secure a cohesive and diverse workforce are leaving at the highest “quit rate” since the government started keeping track more than two decades ago. The data does not answer why specifically, but there are plenty of common threads. Take, for instance, the COVID-19 pandemic. Karin Kimbrough, LinkedIn’s
chief economist, calls it the “take this job and shove it” approach. In a recent interviewwith 60 Minutes , she said, “People have been ‘living to work’ for a very long time. And I think the pandemic brought that moment of reflection for everyone. ‘What do I wanna do? What makes my heart sing?’ And people are thinking, ‘If not now, then when?’” What does this have to do with onboarding? As a marketing professional for more than 25 years, I have welcomed my fair share of staff to the team. I have hired and fired, recruited, and poached. I usually would not associate myself with worrying about the onboarding process. After all, isn’t that an HR thing?
See KRAIG KERN, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER MARCH 21, 2022, ISSUE 1433
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