When I worked internally leading talent development and recruiting, an operations leader regularly came to me frustrated about staffing.

His distribution centers were chronically understaffed, and from his perspective, the problem was obvious: Recruiting wasn't getting enough people in the door.

I understood his frustration. Open positions create very real operational challenges. They drive overtime, put additional pressure on existing employees, and make it harder to meet productivity and service goals.

But I kept pushing back on the idea that recruiting was the problem.

We couldn't just keep filling the bucket. We had to plug the holes.

Turnover was high. We could recruit faster, find new sourcing channels, increase advertising, and bring more people through the door. But if we couldn't keep them, we'd remain understaffed no matter how good we became at recruiting.

Instead of asking, “How can we recruit more people?” I started asking a different question:

Why are we having so much trouble keeping the people we already hire?

Once we started digging, we discovered there wasn't one simple answer. There were issues throughout the employee experience, including:

• Compensation

• Onboarding

• Training

• Frontline leadership

• Culture

• Career and skill development

Recruiting was certainly part of the workforce system, but improving recruiting alone wouldn't solve the problem.

This wasn't a recruiting problem. It was a workforce system problem.

That distinction matters.

When organizations treat chronic understaffing primarily as a recruiting problem, the natural response is to put more resources into hiring. Generate more applicants. Hire faster. Add recruiters. Increase advertising. Offer incentives.

Those strategies may get more people through the door, but they don't address what happens after they arrive.

And they certainly don't guarantee they'll stay.

Look for the Leak

Rather than continuing to push recruiting harder, we eventually piloted a series of changes that addressed multiple parts of the workforce system.

The results went well beyond staffing. We saw meaningful improvements in retention, safety, productivity, workforce flexibility, and labor costs.

I'll share several lessons from that experience in future newsletters. But perhaps the most important one happened before we implemented a single solution.

We stopped trying to solve the symptom and started looking for the root causes.

If your operation is chronically understaffed, recruiting may absolutely be part of the solution. But before investing more time and money into getting people through the door, take a hard look at what happens after they arrive.

Because you can't solve a leaking bucket simply by pouring faster.

Leadership in Practice

Don’t accept the presenting problem at face value.

When a workforce problem keeps coming back, resist the urge to implement another solution immediately. Instead, ask:

• What are we assuming is causing this problem?

• What does the data tell us?

• Where else in the workforce system could the problem be originating?

• Are we addressing the root cause or simply treating the symptom?

For operations and HR leaders, I'm curious: When you're dealing with chronic understaffing, where have you found the biggest leaks in the workforce system?