The NFIB published its monthly jobs report on 2 October, and the numbers describe a position most owners will recognize from their own payroll. According to the NFIB, 17 percent of owners plan to create new jobs in the next three months, unchanged from August. Thirty-two per cent reported openings they could not fill, down three points. Twenty-six per cent named labor quality or availability as their single biggest problem, up three points and fourteen points above the historical average—a net 20 percent plan to raise pay in the next three months, up two.
Employers are proceeding more cautiously as they look to make hiring decisions.
Bill Dunkelberg, NFIB chief economist
Read the two numbers together.
Taken separately, these figures tell opposite stories. Hiring intentions flat and openings down says demand is cooling. Labor quality at fourteen points above its historical average says the difficulty of finding someone good has not eased at all.
Both are true, and together they describe a particular kind of squeeze. You are not struggling to hire because you are growing fast. You are struggling to hire while being careful about whether to hire. Meanwhile, pay is still going up, because the people worth having know what they are worth.
That combination punishes a specific mistake: hiring into a vague gap. When money was cheap, and the pipeline was full, you could take on a capable generalist and let the role find its shape. With net 20 percent planning pay rises and already elevated costs, that approach now costs you twice. Once in salary, and again in the three months it takes to discover the role was never properly defined.
Define the role by what it removes
The useful discipline here is simple, and most owners skip it.
Before you write the advert, write down the hours. Which specific tasks, currently done by you or by someone doing them badly between other duties, will this person take over? Put several hours per week against each one. Add them up. If the total does not come to something close to a full week, you do not have a role. You have a list of annoyances, and a new salary will not fix them.
This has a second benefit. A role defined by the hours it removes is a role you can measure in ninety days. You know what should have come off your plate. You can tell whether it did.
Do the same arithmetic before you raise pay for someone already in post. Pay rises are easier to justify and harder to reverse than almost any other commitment a small firm makes. Tie the rise to the scope, in writing, and both of you know where you stand.
When the problem is not the hire
Sometimes the honest answer is that the work should not be a job at all. A set of genuinely repetitive tasks with predictable inputs is a process problem wearing a recruitment costume. Sometimes the answer is a contractor for six months while you find out whether the volume is real. Sometimes it is fixing the system that is generating the work.
Owners who cannot tell which of those three they are looking at tend to default to hiring, because hiring feels like progress. A second opinion from someone with no stake in the outcome is usually cheaper than the wrong appointment, and structured help with growth decisions like this exists for exactly that reason.
Deciding whether to add a person, a process, or a system, when the market is giving you mixed signals, is the sort of judgment that benefits from someone who has made the call before. That is what executive advisory is for.