Regardless of the overhead model they’re running, many businesses need to replace the talent they lost over the pandemic. Demand is high, and they need the employees to support that demand. But the fact is, they’re having trouble finding them.

What I most often hear is that businesses simply aren’t finding qualified applicants.

What does “qualified applicant” mean? Usually, it’s a catchphrase that means “someone who already knows how to do things the way we do them.”

The questions business owners ask next are, “Where should I be looking?” and “What is the relevant experience I should expect to find?”

These are both good questions. After banging their heads against the wall for a while, many business owners are concluding that the position they’re trying to hire for isn’t out there. Their approach or their ask isn’t working.

They need to do something different.

The Post-Pandemic Hiring Model

An adjusted hiring strategy is especially important right now for two reasons.

For one, businesses are having trouble finding people because there aren’t enough available in the marketplace. Regardless of the underlying reasons behind that, it doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.

This is out of your control.

The other piece of the puzzle is within your control. Many of my clients are actively pursuing a lower-overhead model. They’re learning how to do more with fewer people, outsourcing more direct labor, and retaining the selling, planning, procurement, and prepping for internal staff.

This is a big change from the past, which means the people owners are used to hiring and the job descriptions they’re used to filling don’t necessarily fit what they currently need.

For example, if a client tells me, “I’m having trouble hiring a project manager,” my first response is, “Describe the job you’re trying to fill.”

The client then typically shares the same basic job description they used in 2019. What they really need is a new description that reflects the type of talent necessary for a low-overhead business model.

When I ask why the job description hasn’t changed to outline people with the specific skills they now need, this is the objection that usually comes up: “Because that’s a really expensive person. They’d cost more than the people I’m paying right now!”

The client is still thinking compensation should be the same or only slightly higher than it was before. But you can’t hire people with the skill set you need today for the same money you paid back then.

So the truth comes out. You’re not getting good applicants because good applicants go somewhere that offers the right role for the right pay.

In reality, there’s plenty of good talent out there for the right job at the right compensation. And yes, it will cost more than before. But that’s necessary for the new, low-overhead environment you’re operating in.

To hire successfully, your approach has to change. You may even have to redefine what “relevant experience” really means.

What Is Relevant Experience?

The first thing we all need to realize is that AV is not an industry. AV is a segment within an industry — hospitality. It’s a segment of a segment, a small slice of a much larger industry.

If you’re looking for someone with AV experience in a specific role, you’re scouring an already tiny market of available people that recently dropped by something like 75%. It leaves you with only a handful of possible candidates.

When you broaden your search into the hospitality industry at large, you access a much bigger market, and much bigger pool of applicants. Trade shows, entertainment, hotels, convention centers, catering — so much of hospitality is built around supporting events. And its people can be taught to support ours.

That said, hospitality is the hottest, fastest-growing area in our economy right now. Demand is huge. So despite the greater labor pool, we still have to get better at hiring than we’ve ever been before if we want to compete.

The Objection

The question that naturally comes next is this: “Can someone project manage in AV if they don’t know AV? They won’t know how everything works!”

It’s a fair question. But let me pose another: Do people learn how to wait tables without learning how to cook the dishes?

Of course they do. They don’t have to know how to make the food in order to serve it. They just have to learn the skills related to the dining room.

AV is teachable. The skills and processes are all transferable to newcomers if you have them standardized. If you don’t have transferable and teachable processes, then of course you can’t hire from outside AV. In fact, you may even have trouble hiring from a direct competitor — because you need a person who understands exactly how you do things.

If you’re not standardized, your applicant pool just keeps getting smaller and smaller.

If this is you, then your first step is to make your processes transferable and teachable. In fact, maybe your first outside hire needs to be someone who can help you standardize your processes. Outsiders can be much better at codifying how you do things than insiders because they’re looking at your situation with a fresh set of eyes.

What Roles Are Best Suited for Non-AV People?

If you’ve codified and standardized your processes and procedures, there’s no role you can’t hire from the outside.

That said, some roles will be easier to fill with outside hires than others. It’s more difficult, for instance, to fill a technical role this way, but it can be done IF the person has the aptitude and you have the processes.

The best-suited roles for non-AV hires are sales and certain kinds of project management.

Sales is easy to adapt if you hire someone who’s familiar with your target customer segment because they already speak the language.

Project management — when it’s about managing processes, and not specifying AV — also adapts very well. As with sales, a trained project manager already speaks the language of project management. You just have to teach them the particulars of the processes they’ll manage in your organization.

Both sales and PM roles are actually much easier to hire from the outside than most people realize.

Criteria for Hiring Non-AV Candidates

When interviewing non-AV candidates, you’ll first and foremost want to look at attitude. Will the applicant be comfortable in this complex environment, full of changes and uncertainty? Will they still be pleasant to work with when things go sideways?

The next quality to check for is aptitude. Do they have the ability to understand the role? Can they contribute to making the role better?

Finally, check for adaptability. Can the applicant show how their past experience applies to the current opportunity?

How Does It Look in Practice?

I recently interviewed someone for a controller position with one of my clients. The client liked him for his attitude and his aptitude. Two out of three boxes checked.

I spent most of my time talking with him about adaptability, encouraging him to talk about his earlier jobs and how that experience applied to my client’s current needs.

Now, he didn’t know anything about AV or rental. But he did understand what makes our businesses work, and he can learn our little idiosyncrasies — like depreciating rental equipment over time — as he goes. His accounting background makes the rest easy.

The guy was a great fit. He hit home runs on all three points: attitude, aptitude, adaptability. I immediately texted my client and recommended hiring him.

You can do the same thing in sales, project management, HR, operational management, and warehouse management.

There are fundamental principles that experienced people from other segments of the industry understand. They quickly adapt these to your situation and use their aptitude and attitude to make your business better.

What are you waiting for? Open up to new resources by broadening your hiring horizons.