You Cannot Hire Your Way Out Of This

Of small-business owners who were hiring or trying to hire last month, 87% found few or no qualified applicants. Hiring difficulty has been owners' biggest single problem for three months running. You have three inputs — people, hours, and the amount of work — and only one of them is still yours to move.

The National Federation of Independent Business published its September survey of small-business owners on October 13. The number that got reported is the optimism index: 97.9, down 0.8, a hair under its 52-year average. That is not the useful one. The useful one is 87%. Of the owners who were hiring or trying to hire, 87% said they found few or no qualified applicants. Hiring difficulty has now been owners' single biggest problem for three months running. And a net 17% still plan to add jobs in the next three months, unchanged from August — so the appetite has not gone anywhere. The people have. Who is asking the questions: the National Federation of Independent Business is a small-business advocacy organisation. It runs this survey every month and it also lobbies, so it is not a neutral pollster. Worth knowing. Including ours — we sell IT services, and the obvious reading of "you cannot hire" is "buy software," which is us. What that number means for a thirty-person firm You have three inputs: people, hours, and the amount of work. Two of them are now set by something outside your control. The third is not. That is arithmetic rather than a motivational line, and it points at one specific kind of work — the work that happens the same way every time. Appointment reminders. Chasing unpaid invoices. Setting up a new hire. Re-typing an order out of an email and into a system. Nobody ever chose those as a use of anybody's day. They accumulated. The honest limit, and it costs us the first invoice Nothing gets automated until somebody writes down what actually happens. Not the version in the procedures folder — the real one, including the exception everybody works around on Fridays. We cannot write that down for you. It needs somebody who does the job, an hour, and a sheet of paper. Firms that skip this part buy software that automates a process nobody had agreed on, then pay a second time to undo it. What to do this week Pick one job. The one that happens most often, not the one that annoys you most. Write down every step , including the waiting. Count the retyping. Every time a person moves the same data from one screen to another, that is a step a computer does for nothing and a person does with mistakes. If the list comes out longer than you expected, that is the finding, not a failure. Firms are routinely surprised by their own process, and the surprise is where the hours have been hiding.