Ontario recently joined Alberta as the 2nd province in Canada to announce a minimum wage hike to $15.00/hr from the present $11.40/hr, effective January 1, 2019. Everyone is bracing for the impact this will have on hiring, overall employment, and the price of goods and services. CBC has created a powerful infographic showing the wage hike represents an increase of almost $8000/yr for minimum wage earners, which is touted as the living wage. For employers, there are no simple terms to describe the full extent of the upcoming changes.
Companies with hourly employees are expected to absorb the wage hike, which amounts to an increase of 31.6% for what is typically the single largest category of expenses in their budget. Add to that 10 mandatory personal emergency leave days, 2 of which are required to be paid. Restaurants and bars face a proportionate wage hike for liquor servers going from $9.90/hr today up to $13.05/hr. While some large companies might be able to absorb these increases, many small businesses will feel the pinch on a much higher scale and will have to make some hard decisions.
It is impossible to predict how companies will adjust, but there will undoubtedly be a loss of jobs. Even before Ontario’s announcement, in March 2016 The Fraser Institute released a study of the impact of raising the minimum wage from $11.00/hr to $15.00/hr. In their employment models, they predicted that approximately 251,000 fewer people are employed if the minimum wage jumps that drastically. Retail, restaurants, and hotels already run on thin margins and the wage hike will mean these businesses will have to make decisions on each and every employee. And as expected, they will likely keep their best performers and dump the worst. The result? Recruiting quality employees will become significantly more difficult and businesses will be forced to raise their recruiting game or face the risk of losing the company altogether. If you thought hiring quality candidates is difficult now, the game just got even harder.
So how do you raise your recruiting game? The most obvious answer is to look at ways of improving your selection process. While the number of resumes you receive will likely grow after hourly employees are laid off, you will need more than a discerning eye or keyword software to hire quality candidates. If you haven’t already started using behavioural assessments to identify candidates for cultural and long term fit, it’s time to give that a test drive. Candidates that better fit your culture will be an asset to your existing team and will help to raise morale, thus reducing turnover. Once the hike has taken hold, companies will undoubtedly work harder to retain their best employees for longer terms, shedding difficult or less desirable employees. Over time, this will become the norm and the challenge to hire the best candidates will only become more intensive.
If you aren’t already leveraging social media, it’s time to muster up the courage to modernize and acknowledge the growing power of establishing a social media presence and what it can do for any company size. The fast-food giant, McDonald’s, has already been using social media advertising for years to feed their constant recruiting needs. However, huge capital investments on professional short videos and marketing are not an absolute requirement to compete with the big guys in social media. Actually, the biggest challenge of utilizing social media is not dollars, but the time needed to maintain and manage social media. And if you lack both the time and capital to invest, perhaps it is time to reallocate some recruiting dollars to outsourcing. Companies that provide recruitment outsourcing solutions have teams of recruiters with years of experience in creating and maintaining social media accounts to help drive recruiting strategies. Since the hourly employee demographic is mostly made up of younger candidates, having social media capabilities is shifting towards being less of a want, and more of a need.
As the world of recruiting evolves rapidly, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and to fear keeping up with the times. Technology advances exponentially and job seekers are becoming more demanding. Fortunately, Mindfield already has years of experience in building behavioural assessments into your recruiting process and social media management. We can quickly merge our solutions to modernize your recruiting campaign and help you source candidates in ways you may have never explored before. Designed for both small and large companies, Mindfield is quickly becoming the recruitment outsourcing solutions provider of choice for hundreds of employers because we can offer significant value through our offerings due to economies of scale, which translates into elite recruitment services for any size client. The countdown to the minimum wage hike has already started. How will you adapt and evolve?
About Mindfield
Mindfield is a Recruitment Outsourcing Solutions provider that partners with companies to create powerful hourly workforces. Our solutions combine a recruitment team, simple to use technology and a data-driven hiring strategy that promises to improve the quality of your hourly workforce. This approach focuses on tying business outcomes such as sales performance, tenure, and engagement to the selection, hiring and measurement of quality candidates.