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Staffing Up After a Recession: Who to Hire When

Dec 5, 2024

When the economy shrinks and demand dries up, companies often feel obligated to trim their staff. While it’s pa💖inful,🎉 it’s a natural part of the economic cycle of any organization.
According to : The tech lay𝓡off wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year [2024] has more th💫an 130,000 job cuts across 457 companies.
While layoffs are more commonplace (and more accepted) in some industries than others during these times,﷽ the process is never a pleasant one. But sometim𝄹es layoffs are a must to stay profitable — or even stay afloat.
The opposite is also true, however. When the econo🥂my is hot and demand is high, teams are going to staff up.
For buౠsiness ♐leaders, staffing up after a recession comes with its own challenges.
If you’re in this boat — planni🌳ng to hire back after layoffs — you want to be sure you get this right. ﷽Below, I’ll explain how I recommend you proceed.
When it’s time to hire for your future
For many businesses coming out of a recession or downturn🌜, they fall into one of t♋wo camps:
The first wants to scale back up to their previous stren𓂃gth, so they jump at the chance of filling the positions they lost.
The others take the opposite approach — sort of a once-bitten, twice-shy mindset.
After the experience of having to cut staff once, they’re hesitant to hire, fearing that they might have to go through🐷 the whole thing again if they add headcount too quickly.
For me, hiring decisions are always a balance of data and intuition. So my advice to you is this: Hire smart. Your goal is not to add headcount, it’s to find great candidates.
Bill Gates famously said that a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software 🍸writer.
Fꦍor whatever role you’re hiring for, the great candidate will deliver way more value th❀an the average candidate.
If you’re looking to hire and can’t find someone great, don’t fill the role until you find the right person. Or, if you’ve got a pipeline ful⛦l of exceptional applicants, maybe hire more than one if your budget and fore✤cast allow it.
With any newꦐ🌃 hire, you’ve got a chance to raise the overall ability of your team, but if you bring on the wrong person because you jumped the gun, you could be kicking yourself for years.
Post-recession hir𝓡ing is y🌱our chance to find that all-star.
Don’t hire for what you lost; hire for the future
According to research from Accenture, 88% of executives believe that .
This reflects t♊he crisis that companies of all kinds are facing: Not effectively adapting to a changing marketplace.
Judging by the statistic above, your company might be in need of change. Although layoffs are never easy, there can be a silver lining. Maybe the staff you employed a few years ago doesn’t really fit your needs today — let a✨lone your needs a few years from now.
For example, it’s easy to just want to hire back to fill the roles you lost: You had to cut three sales rep jobs? Now it’s time to hire three new sales reps.
However, I ur🎀ge you to avoid that kind of⭕ knee-jerk reaction.
This is an opportun⭕ity to hire for your company’s f♏uture, not its past.
First, figure out how you’re bringing in revenue
Recently I compiled a big spreadsheet of every deal IMPACT had closed in the last six months. I listed ea꧅ch customer, what they bought, how they heard of us, how long they took to close, and about a half-dozen other pieces of information.
Ahead of our quarterly planning session, I asked all🌺 our company leaders and managers to study the spreadsheet. Then, at the planning session, I split them into groups and asked them what we needed to do🌊 to close more business. Imagine a Stop/Start/Keep brainstorming session.
By focusing only on the past six months, we eliminated historical bias and outdated approaches. We came up with a ♕list of marketing and sales priorities based on the way our most recent customers were buying from us.
168极速赛车平台:You should do the same.
Before you jump back in and hire the exact r꧙oles you lost, look closely at your numbers. If you’re ready to add headcount, do it in the places that make the most sense for you based on data, not nostalgia.
168极速赛车平台:Hire for your future, not for🍌 your past.
While you’re at it, audit your hiring process
One more thing: before you go on a hiring spree, take some time to look at your hiring process with a critical eye.
In a famous st🌺udy done a few years back, Jobvite found that of starting their new job. And that was before the pandemic, the great resignation, and quiet quitting.
Part of the fault for this lꦯies with workers, sure, but I believe a bigger share of the blame rests with employers.
Is your hiring process designed around the candidate’s needs? Are you using techniques like the 168极速赛车平台:80% video to cover as many of the🐽 applicant’s questions ahead of time so you can weed out those who might be a bad fit? Are 💎you committed to transparency and honesty?
If not, fix your process before yo♑u star🐎t putting more people through it.
This is the opportunity you’ve been waiting for
In the past few years we’ve seen drast🌞ic economic swings.
First, there was the shock of the pandemic. The bottom fell out of the stock market and unemployment spiked. Then, the government flooded the economy with stimulus money and businesses were flush with cash. Since then, there have be♋en supply chain issues, high energy costs, and political instability.
It’s been a wild ride.
And while these last few years have been especially volati💦le, the economy is always going to go up and down. As a business owner, you know there will be fat years and lea🍃n years, good times and bad times.
This is the natural cycle of business.
The key is to💛 see every up and🔯 down as an opportunity. If you’re ready to hire after a recession, use it as the opportunity to build a staff for the bu🍰siness you’re becoming, not the business you were.


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