The pandemic hit 6 months ago. The first stage is complete panic, and everyone just freezes. Hiring grinds to a near halt and everyone is just happy to have a job. Then 3 months go by and people are working twice as hard for half the pay. 6 months go by and people start to wonder whether they want or can do this job much longer.
This is where we are right now. I wrote in a previous post about this being the golden period for opportunistic hiring. It still is and will continue to be for another 3-6 months I believe. However, someone must have read my post (😊) because I have had some particularly bad news recently.
It’s Friday morning at the end of the month, when up pops a calendar invitation into one of my manager’s diaries for that afternoon. This is a very very bad sign. Why has this person booked it in on the last day of the month? Why the afternoon? Why is no agenda provided? Why has this person not replied when I emailed for lunch last week? Why has this person been avoiding eye contact and kept their head down at the desk last week? We do not need Sherlock Holmes or even Netflix’s new “Elona Holmes” to get involved in this one. It is, for sure, a resignation.
Even though I knew it was coming by the afternoon, it was gut wrenching. If you are a leader and it has never happened to you, good for you, I hope it never happens. But one day it might. Particularly as your team gets larger and your career continues to grow.
This person was one the most positive, hardworking, truly great people I have ever had the opportunity to meet. Let alone work with! Annoyingly, it had been on my mind for the last 3 months or so that we might be in danger of losing this person. Their market has been badly hit through the pandemic and it may or may not change in the next 3-6 months. The offer that came in for this person was 50% higher than we were prepared to pay. The final nail in the coffin for me was that it is in an industry that this person truly loves, marrying their hobby and their job nicely together. You know what? Good for them, it sounded like a great opportunity.
When you lose someone of this quality my reaction seems to follow a predictable pattern. The “7 stages of grief”:
- Shock and denial
- Pain and guilt
- Anger & Bargaining
- Depression
- The upward turn
- Reconstruction and working through
- Acceptance and hope
One thing I have noticed though is that when something like this happens you don’t need to go through all these stages. In my case I worry endlessly about losing certain people in the team regularly. So typically I go straight to pain. This one was particularly traumatic, so it was a horrible stomach-churning pain that lasted all day. Having been a professional headhunter for almost 15 years now and a leader for 10 years, I can quite quickly assess whether there is an opportunity to keep someone or not. There was absolutely no way in this case. So now I am working through to the final acceptance and hope, as are the other leaders in my team.
So, what do you do when this happens? There is no magic formula for keeping someone. It feels very similar to when a girlfriend or boyfriend decides to break up a relationship. There is nothing you can do to change the other person’s mind. However, you can control how you react.
In this case I said thank you for all your hard work, explained how much they meant to me and the team. Then said that if there is anything I can do in future; they must reach out. I very much intend to honor this and call from time to time. There is little to no chance we will ever work again, but this is a truly impressive individual and it is a real pleasure to speak with someone like this.
Which leads me to a point I made in a previous post about now being the time for opportunistic hiring. Now is very much the time. If you aren’t doing it, I guarantee you someone else is!
