The Great Reshuffling

Introduction

It is impossible that you haven’t experienced in some way or another how crazy the job market is right now. What was initially called “The Great Resignation” is now more appropriately understood as “The Great Reshuffling” and is having a profound effect on how professionals and businesses think about work and talent. But what exactly is happening? In this article, I will explain all the factors that have led to this new era of employment and how both business and professionals should adapt. Buckle in as there is a lot to talk about and I wrote this to be a comprehensive explanation (this means VERY long).

Understanding The Great Reshuffling

There are a lot of factors that have come together to create the turbulent job market we see today. To broadly summarize, an increase in demand for talent from businesses, and professionals being more selective about what they want from their careers, has created a candidate’s market where companies are fighting to retain and attract talent. Businesses have been slow to adapt and so many are experiencing a lot of pain as they lose talent and must scramble to find replacements while teams are saddled with more work than ever before.

As there are a lot of reasons for The Great Reshuffling, I am going to break them into two categories: Pull and Push. Simply, what is pulling candidates to other opportunities and what is pushing them from their current positions.

Pull

Insane Hiring Demand

While covid has had a broadly negatively impacted the economy, many big tech giants, large companies, and promising startups have seen profits and investment resulting in growth and a need for more talent. On top of this, coming out of the worst of covid, even businesses who were hit hard are ramping back up and looking to hire. This means an all time record number of job postings on LinkedIn and across many other job sites as well.

Lack of Talent

The big problem these companies are facing is that there simply is not enough talent to satisfy this demand. First, covid killed a lot of jobs, causing some professionals to retire early or find alternate ways of supporting themselves. Recent graduates had trouble finding work and so either moved back in their families or went back to school. Because of this, there is simply less talent in the market than there would have been. I would argue that even in the timeline where covid never happened, we would still not have enough talent to meet the demand of all these growing companies. And a decrease or limit in supply means a higher cost for demand.

Working Remote

Now that we have run the “remote work experiment”, companies feel more comfortable hiring remote workers. And while remote companies have access to more candidates, they still have to compete against opportunities and offers from other remote companies. This causes a ton of competition for the best candidates, forcing companies to make more lucrative offers and provide better incentives. Hybrid and in office companies are also affected as their local candidate pool may also be considering remote work opportunities that now need to be competed with.

Ease of Switching Jobs

This is going to be one of the bigger factors and there are many things that are contributing to it being easier to switch jobs than ever before.

Working Remote

Just as allowing employees to work from home opens up companies to a larger candidate pool, more remote friendly companies means more potential jobs for professionals willing to work remotely. And with this increased number of potential companies, professionals have more options and are more likely to find better opportunities.

Ease of Applying and Interviewing

Finding a job, learning about companies, sending in an application, and interviewing has only gotten easier. With better recruiting technology, companies can easily push job postings to plenty of job boards, aggregate applications, review resumes, and engage candidates. It is also seen as a baseline requirement that companies have a career and culture page where they can share important information with job seekers.

Not only that, but the tools and best practice knowledge for job seekers has improved, making it easier to find jobs, put together resumes, and interview. With the adoption and improvement of video call technology and other remote resources, candidates no longer have to come in for in-person interviews and can more easily work interviewing into their schedule.

All of these quality of life improvements means finding potential fits and interviewing is easier and less time consuming for both sides, dramatically increasing the ease of switching jobs. 

Powerful and Universal Work Tools

Working for a new company used to mean learning brand new systems and processes for work, but now with a broad standardization of work tools and best practices, employees can expect to find the same or very similar tools and processes no matter their company. The tools themselves are also much better, making them more intuitive and powerful. This means a lot less pain for both a new hire and the company as less time and effort needs to be spent on learning and onboarding respectively. 

Greater Recognition of The Transferability of Skills

While there is certainly an advantage of experience in a given domain, with professional education tools, this knowledge is becoming increasingly easy to learn. Which means that when companies are hiring, they are less worried about industry specific knowledge and more about the fundamental skills necessary for success in a career. So where it was once difficult to transition from one industry to another, companies are more willing to acknowledge the transferability of core skills and take a chance on a candidate’s ability to learn domain knowledge.

Less Dependence on Companies for Networks and Resources

They say that it is not just what you know, but who you know. Businesses used to be able to provide their employees with a large amount of connectivity with resources and other professionals, but the ability to build and search a network has become easier with open social connection tools and sites such as LinkedIn. This independence means professionals are less reliant on their company and can take their networks with them.

Less Negative Stigma with Moving

It used to be that a candidate who moved around was seen as a flight or competency risk, but with such turbulence over the last few years and more professionals demanding more from their work, frequent movement can be due to a lot more factors than just a flaky or bad employee. Coupled with the fact that there is so much demand, recruiting teams are much more willing to overlook frequent movement which would have been a nonstarter a few years ago.

Dramatic Increase in Salaries

The rise in salaries is happening for a few reasons. First, inflation is very much a real thing and the cost of living has risen dramatically over the past few years. We can thank covid, but also the Fed for printing an absolutely insane amount of money (I have my thoughts on this, let me tell you). Competition between companies for talent also means they need to be willing to put more money on the table to land the best talent. I would also point out that workers, both white and blue collar, have probably been due for a substantial pay raise as the gap between cost of living and salaries has been getting wider for many Americans. But whatever the reasons, salaries are going up and this means that if companies don't offer raises, many professionals are looking to increase their income by landing a new opportunity. 

Mindfulness About Career Goals

As we have all gone through the isolation of lockdown the past few years, it was hard to not reflect critically about our work experience. First, being locked down meant that work became a more prominent element of our lives. There were simply less things going on outside of work to worry about and so we paid more attention to our work experience. We also worried more about our work. With so many people across the world getting furloughed or laid off, we all had to face the stark reality that work might not always be as reliable as we hope and we need to find ways to ensure better job security. And finally, through any crisis, it is almost inevitable that one will reflect critically on their purpose and meaning in life. Are we spending our time on this planet how we truly want to? And this reflection caused a lot of workers to realize they want more from their work and to seek better opportunities that more closely aligned with what they really want.

Push

Inability to Express Problems

Companies should certainly want their employees to let them know what work issues they have so those issues can be addressed. But, even with a company working to understand their employees issues, the problem with this is twofold: sometimes the company has not built enough trust with its employees where those employees feel like they can express their concerns, and second, sometimes we simply don’t understand our own problems enough to express them even if we wanted to. Whatever the case, without knowledge of the problem, companies are in a tough spot on how to better serve their employees.

Waning Faith in Potential for Change

Even worse, sometimes employees feel like they are correctly escalating problems, but those problems are still not being properly addressed. As we will talk about, many of the business functions responsible for management, retention, and employee happiness are understaffed and not empowered enough to be effective. If you are an employee who feels like you can’t expect change no matter how much you ask for it, there is a good chance you will start looking for better opportunities.

Pain of Losing Team Members

This is a core factor of push that I think many companies are not aware of or, at least, not aware of how detrimental this really is. When you lose a team member, it is often the case that the remaining members of the team are left to pick up the slack. This happened across the board during the layoffs through covid, but, at the time, workers were happy to have jobs and so soldiered on. But now, given the increase in opportunities, as coworkers resign and teams are left behind with a larger workload, remaining employees are more likely to look for work elsewhere. This can have a cascading effect, causing one lost team member to snowball into more and more exits.

Pain of Hiring Replacement Talent

Not only does losing a coworker mean the remaining team members must pick up their slack, but now must also hire a replacement. This requires not only conducting interviews, which is typically a very time consuming process with little immediate benefit, but also onboarding that new team member, which is also a huge commitment of time. And sometimes, even with a good recruiting process and a lot of hard work, teams can make a bad hire, only to realize it after all that time and money has been wasted. Ultimately, finding and training a replacement is a bit of a risk and always a huge sink of time and energy, often added on top of the team’s already increased workload.

Lack of Quality People Ops Support

A big factor in this cascade of attrition is an ineffective response by the HR/People Ops function at the business. I want to be clear that this is not because these teams don’t care, but are often understaffed themselves and rarely empowered to take the appropriate action necessary to help increase retention. And if People Ops doesn’t have the ability to address issues, the business will have trouble stemming attrition. 

Poor Hiring

Sometimes employee attrition isn’t dependent on the environment an employee is in, but whether they were even a good fit in the first place. And this responsibility falls on the recruiting team. Was the recruiting team and hiring manager honest about the role and what the candidate could expect? Was the candidate not just a fit from a skills perspective, but also as far as their interest in the work itself? Poor hiring can set an employee up for failure, no matter what is done to support them in the role.

Recruiting is Underserved

Similar to People Ops often being understaffed and underpowered, recruiting in our current environment is in a similarly worse state. As I am a recruiter myself, I could write a library on this, but I’ll try to break it down in a few key points.

Lack of Business Awareness of The Importance of Recruiting

Yeah, I am aware of how this looks 😏

A business can correctly identify market needs and think of profitable solutions, but if their employees are not good at executing, that business can still fail. So I would point out that businesses live and die foremost by their ability to build the right team. However, business success is rarely attributed to the building of the team, but most often to the team themselves. This is understandable, as it was the team who did the work, but it is important to realize that good recruiting makes it possible. 

Think of The Avengers saving New York from an alien invasion. While it was the team’s heroism that saved the day, I doubt you think much about the work Nick Fury had to do to recruit them and bring them together to make it all possible in the first place. No Nick Fury, no Avengers, bye bye New York. Poor recruiting function, suboptimal employees, less chance of business success.

Poor Incentives for Internal Recruiters

To be an effective recruiter, you need two key skill sets: sales and product management. That is to say recruiters need to be able to sell talent on the opportunity of working at their company, and they need to be able to work with hiring managers (stakeholders) to build and run a process and promote an opportunity (the product) to engage, assess, and land ideal candidates (customers). The problem is that these skills often pay better in actual sales and product management roles, resulting in professionals who would be strong recruiters being more incentivized to follow other career paths. On top of that, even if you have the right skills and want to be a recruiter, you can often make more money working for an external agency because of the lucrative commission structure. So while it pains me to say it, because of the poor incentives for those with the right skillset, internal recruiting has a lot of trouble attracting the best professionals the job market has to offer.

Covid Destroyed Recruiting

At the beginning of covid, many companies didn’t know how bad things would be and felt they might need to take drastic measures to protect profitability. This meant tightening the belt, stopping hiring and, with no work for recruiters, laying off their talent teams. So almost every recruiter lost their job or saw a drastic drop in their business. And it wasn’t like these recruiters could find recruiting work elsewhere; no one was hiring.

Because of this, many of the recruiters who did have transferable skills ended up switching careers, utilizing those sales or product management skills I talked about earlier. This means that not only has the recruiter population shrank, but many of the recruiters who successfully changed careers had stronger transferable skills and more grit to make the career shift. Consequently, all of the companies trying to hire like crazy are working with significantly fewer and lower quality recruiter talent pool than they had previously.

Whew!

I know that was a lot, but hopefully you are starting to see that The Great Reshuffling is not just a temporary blip, but a massive perfect storm of many critical factors coming together. Next, let’s dive into how companies should be reacting to The Great Reshuffling if they want to take advantage of these turbulent times and how you as a savvy professional can react as well.

What Companies Need to Know

I find it unlikely that the conditions of The Great Reshuffling will change in a significant way in the immediate future, so companies will either need to adapt to this new environment or risk high turnover and the pain that comes with it. In this section I will cover what companies need to understand and do in order to be successful in this new job market.

Philosophy

Let’s start by diving into the underlying philosophy that companies will need to adopt to be successful.

Figure Out What Your Employees Want and Deliver

You might have picked up on a common thread in the reasons for The Great Reshuffling and that is that professionals are thinking more critically about what they want, are having a hard time expressing it to companies, and, more importantly, are doubtful they will see the changes they want. This means that understanding what employees are looking for and delivering it will be essential to businesses who want to retain talent.

Build Better Relationships and Culture

In order to figure out what employees want, businesses need to facilitate manager relationships and a company culture that encourages honesty and empowers employees to safely express themselves. This is not easy and takes time and effort on the part of the business, but is absolutely necessary if they are going to learn enough about employee problems to effectively address them. 

Hire for Longterm Fit

As I pointed out in Poor Hiring, sometimes the problem is not a matter of providing the right culture, but the fact that businesses are trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. If a business recruits someone who fundamentally isn’t a fit, there isn’t anything that can be done to make that relationship work. So finding ways to be more effective at hiring the right fit from the beginning is essential to increasing retention. 

A Happy Employee is a Productive Employee

I know that it might seem disingenuous for a company to ensure their employees are happy so that they will be productive, but regardless of the motivation, companies need to understand that the less an employee is bothered with all the frustrations of a suboptimal work environment, the more headspace they will have to drive value for the business. So companies need to understand that employee happiness directly correlates with profit. Thus businesses should be highly incentivized to make sure their employees are as happy as possible. 

Dangers of Not Responding

With all of the difficulties companies are facing to keep employees happy, and the allure of seemingly better opportunities available to professionals, companies need to be aware of and address The Great Reshuffling or risk high turnover. And the pain of turnover to the bottomline of a business is comically underestimated. I would go so far as to say that even the talent professionals I have talked to who think turnover is a huge problem are still underestimating all of the pain turnover causes for a business because there are so many rarely understood and hard to identify impacts turnover can have. 

Stress on Teams

As I pointed out earlier, losing a coworker often means their work will fall on the shoulders of the remaining team members. This can take a workload that was tenable for others and push it over the threshold, causing a cascade effect of team members leaving as there are fewer and fewer employees to handle the same workload. I would highly recommend companies nip this in the bud and make sure they scale workload with the capacity of the team in the event of any departures.

Losing Knowledge

When you lose a team member, you aren’t just losing their ability to produce value, but also all the unique domain knowledge they have gained working in their role. Imagine all the infrastructure knowledge a senior devops engineer has completely vanishing when that engineer leaves the company. Not only that, but the engineers who pick up that workload cannot fulfill those responsibilities without first learning that domain knowledge themselves. This lost knowledge is a huge factor as to why turnover is so much more painful for companies than can be observed on a surface level.

Losing Productivity

As turnover increases workload on remaining teams and creates huge gaps in knowledge, this results in giant losses in momentum of productivity compared to if the company was able to retain that employee and keep them happily motivated in their work.

Unhappy Teams Do NOT Hire Well

If your team is stressed with a heavy workload and unconfident in the business’ ability to address issues, this will come across to candidates who are interviewing with your company. It will be much harder to attract and land good talent if the business is not doing a good job of keeping the employees they already have happy. So not only will attrition hurt a business’ immediate productivity, but it will impede them in hiring to solve their staffing problems in the future.

Bottom Line

The pain of turnover, because it can be hard to quantify, is often vastly underestimated. It is not only the loss of productivity, but the extra strain it puts on the team, and how this will inhibit hiring the talent needed to solve these problems. I would argue that the effort and resources a company could expend to increase retention has a huge ROI. If companies don’t recognize this and start addressing it, they will see a significant cut in their bottom line and risk these problems cascading into an increasingly worse situation.

Personally, it blows my mind that companies aren’t addressing this more aggressively. There is always this talk of finding an edge in the market: How does a company beat out their competition? And I think that companies are way too focused on finding this out in the market and painfully blind to how this could be achieved in a better approach to hiring and retaining talent. Honestly, I think the companies that address this issue will have such a significant advantage that it is on the level of first mover advantage. Mark my words, companies will live and die by how they respond to The Great Reshuffling.

The Danger Of Remote Work

One of the key reasons we are seeing so many of the issues causing The Great Reshuffling is the shift to remote work. And similar to how it is hard to quantify the real pain of turnover, the downsides of remote work are difficult to identify and so often overlooked. Most noticeably, interactions in a remote environment become vastly more transactional and it is hard to have many of the little social interactions that help build strong company culture and relationships, keep employees motivated, and enable the dissemination and pollination of ideas. These downsides are missed largely due to the fact that professionals are overvaluing the face value positives of remote work flexibility. 

Difficult to Maintain A Positive Company Culture Remotely

It is incredibly hard to maintain a healthy company culture and cohesion in a remote environment. Culture is not just the values on the company website, but comes from interacting with team members, fun banter, and building personal and human connections. Those are just impossible to have in a remote environment without a lot of deliberate effort and companies are rarely going out of their way to provide these experiences to their employees.

Weaker Relationships with Managers and People Ops

It is really hard to build strong relationships in a remote environment. And, as I have mentioned before, stronger employee relationships between hiring managers and HR business partners means that companies can have clearer insight into the problems their employees are experiencing and how to address them. Without strong relationships, many companies are going to be flying blind as to how to address retention and will be unable to avoid turnover. 

Lack of Motivation

Any remote worker can tell you that it can be hard to find motivation when working remote. Our desire to be productive stems from a sense of connection with our team and our goals. We also love to see tangible results from our work. These factors are much harder to manifest in a remote environment, and as such, remote companies will need to go out of their way to find ways to enhance this, or risk a demotivated workforce.

Remote Work Means Less Cross Pollination of Ideas 

One of the major benefits of working in an office with a strong company culture is the interaction of employees from different departments. We are not often exposed to the goings on of other parts of the business except at a high level, but this exposure can be extremely beneficial. It can help boost understanding of the company, its product, and its problems across departments which can lead to amazing innovations and increased synergy. With remote work, these natural opportunities for cross pollination fall to almost zero.

How Companies Can Respond

Either Go Hybrid or Be Proactive About Addressing Remote Issues

Fully remote work is way worse, or at least comes with many more issues, for companies than is currently understood. If companies want to adapt effectively to The Great Reshuffling, dealing with the remote work shift will be a big factor in their success. Unless necessitated by the work, I think it is basically suicide to push for a full work week in the office, and even four days is dangerous at best, but two to three days in the office will go a long way to countering the dangers of remote work I listed earlier. And if a company needs to or is dead set on being remote, they will have to make a very strong and concerted effort to address these downsides or risk large amounts of turnover.

Invest in People Ops

We didn’t dive into numbers, but I can guarantee you that the annual salary of an HR Business Partner is easily worth the cost of turnover for one senior engineer. So it would follow that a company that invests in their People Ops team and has more resources to put toward understanding what their employees want and keeping them happy will see an amazing RIO. I believe this to such an extent that, when assessing companies, candidates should be just as interested in the strength of the People Ops team as they should be in the fundamental profitability of the company.

Invest in Recruiting

Just as retention is important, if you don’t do an effective job in recruiting at assessing fit and engaging high quality candidates, then you won’t have a team you can retain, let alone are worth retaining. This means companies need to increase the incentives and attract better recruiting talent. Again, the RIO on a good recruiter is huge. Recruiting better talent across the company who are more aligned with their work will result in dramatic downstream benefits. Not only will the company have more effective and well aligned employees, but happy and talented employees attract more of the same! Just as attrition can have a negative feedback loop, effective recruiting and happy teams can have a powerful positive feedback effect.

What Professionals Need to Know

For you, savvy professional, The Great Reshuffling is an opportunity to be more selective and find a position that is better aligned with your ideal. I want to caution you that every company is experiencing the difficulties associated with The Great Reshuffling, so don’t be tricked into thinking the grass is always greener on the other side. But whether you are demanding more at your current company, or seeing what the job market has to offer, now is your chance to make sure you are getting more for your work. 

Know What You Want

The first step in this process will be understanding what you want. As I mentioned, companies are having trouble getting employees to tell them what they want because there is a lack of trust and/or the employees don’t even know themselves. I would encourage you to figure out what you want and not be afraid to express it. This means taking the time to reflect critically about what that is for you. I have an article in the career search section of my website in the works which I plan to publish soon and should help with how to approach figuring out what you are looking for.

Go After What You Want in Your Current Role

Getting what you want takes a strong Frame and Managing Up skills. I highly recommend you read both of those articles if you are interested in how you can get what you want from your current company. I would also recommend seeing if you can make things work before you write off your current company as the problems you may be experiencing currently also exist at every other company you could move to.

Explore New Opportunities

All this being said, I think it is never a bad idea to know what is out there and know what you are worth. As I pointed out earlier, applying and interviewing is very low cost, and usually has other benefits. You can meet other professionals in your industry for networking, learn how much you're worth, and I would go so far as to say that a good recruiting process can help you understand more about what you want and how you think about your work. Bottom line, there has never been a better time to see what opportunities are out there. 

Conclusion

Ok, this one was long, but it had to be done. I wanted to give a comprehensive view of The Great Reshuffling and I didn’t want to cut any corners here. Hopefully this has helped give you a better understanding of the situation and how you, either as someone who is trying to adapt their company, or a professional trying to get the most out of their work, can best take advantage of The Great Reshuffling. In the end, I think that hard times drive innovation and I think this time might just result in a better work experience for all of us!