COVID-19 brought a new reality to the workforce industry: hundreds of thousands, if not millions of job openings, have remained unfilled for the past two years as managers searched high and low for talent that was seemingly sparse.
Factors relating to the virus changed the conditions in which Americans were willing to go back or even continue working, with many reconsidering the plans they have for their career paths. In 2021, more than 47 million workers quit their jobs while 32% of Americans switched their careers, ushering in a wave of unemployed workers and the Great Resignation. Employees held more power than their employers and demonstrated it through demands for higher wages, remote-working policies, and safety protocols around COVID-19.
But the Great Resignation, according to economic experts, may be coming to an end. As the U.S. slowly approaches an oncoming recession, company labor departments across industries are instilling hiring freezes and implementing strategies to fill positions with temporary, unpaid or less expensive help (i.e. freelancers, interns, seasonal employees, etc.).
“Unfilled jobs were a primary reason that seven in ten companies fell behind in scheduled production, leading many industry leaders to identify labor shortages as a challenge to growth,” McKinsey & Company reported.
In the AlphaSense platform, conversations around “labor shortage” are certainly not sanctioned to a particular industry but rather a pain point most industries are managing. We dug into our content library to see how C-Suite executives in the top five industries are planning to overcome it.
Manufacturing
For companies selling and distributing products across industries, the issue of talent retention and replacement has been extraordinarily detrimental to QoQ revenue performance and customer satisfaction. To solve this issue, companies have pushed aggressive hiring practices–throwing large employment events and offering employees higher wages and referral bonuses.
“While a wide variety of industrial products are required in order to respond to diversifying customer demands and objectives, the labor shortage in the manufacturing industry has become serious, and it has become difficult to respond with conventional production methods dependent on individual employees.”
– Okuma Corp. 2022 Earnings Call
“Whilst many of our present operating challenges are difficult to influence, we do want to put the spotlight on one particular aspect that requires prompt action to avoid a repeat performance for next year’s primary sector season of crops, and that is labor. Our cargo customers remain concerned by restrictions on the availability of labor, and in particular, ongoing difficulty with securing RSE workers despite the borders now being open.”
Napier Port Holdings Ltd.