39 - Beat the skills shortage.

Another HR Headache

How to find, grow and keep the skills your business needs when the market simply does not have enough of them.

Picture the bind. The business is ready to grow, the work is there and you cannot find the people to do it. You need real expertise, technical skill, specialist knowledge, a steady pair of hands in a key role and the pool of people who fit just is not there. The ones who do exist are expensive, hard to land and quickly poached. Meanwhile the team you have is straining to cover the gap and you can feel the strain turning into something more dangerous.

Skills shortages are not a passing inconvenience for New Zealand SMEs. They are a structural fact of running a small business in a tight labour market, made worse by industries shifting faster than the supply of trained people can keep up. The big firms can outspend you for the rare talent and run their own pipelines to grow more. You have a payroll to meet and roles that need filling now.

The cost of leaving it unsolved is real even though no invoice ever arrives. Your existing people get overloaded, then burnt out, then gone, which deepens the very shortage you were trying to plug. Projects slip and customers feel it. Competitors with the skills you lack pull steadily ahead. A shortage ignored does not stay still. It compounds.

The reassuring part is that you are not stuck with only the option you cannot afford, which is to outbid everyone for scarce talent. There are three other moves and together they beat the shortage. Work out which gaps actually matter, get creative about attracting people and above all growing your own. Here is where to start.

You will not always be able to hire the skills you need. You can almost always build them.

Work out which gaps actually threaten the business

Money and effort get wasted chasing every shortage at once, so start by being clear about which gaps genuinely matter. Hold a simple skills audit up against where the business is heading. What do you actually need to grow? What does the current team have and where are the real holes? Where are you dangerously dependent on one person who could walk out tomorrow? Then sort the gaps by how much they threaten the business, the ones that stop daily work, the ones that block growth and the ones coming down the track in a few years. A clear-eyed audit turns a vague sense of shortage into a short list you can actually act on.

Look for talent where others are not

If the obvious pool is empty, stop fishing in it. Widen the search instead. Roles that can be done remotely open the whole country, or further, rather than just the people who can drive to your door. Part-time, contract and freelance arrangements let you buy specialist skill in slices rather than whole hires. Most usefully, stop holding out for the flawless candidate who ticks every box and never appears. Hire for attitude and the foundations, then train the rest. An adaptable person you develop will often beat the perfect-fit unicorn you wait two years to find.

Be the place skilled people choose

When skills are scarce, the people who have them get to choose and they do not choose on pay alone. They weigh up the culture, the leadership and whether they can see themselves growing with you. Use that. Be clear about the path someone could take here, because ambitious people want a direction, not just a job. Lean into the flexibility a small business can offer faster than a big one. Let your people's own stories of progress do the talking. A good small employer can out-compete a bigger one for talent, not by paying more but by offering something the bigger one cannot, which is to be genuinely seen.

Keep the skilled people you already have

A shortage gets sharply worse when the skilled people you have decide to leave, so retention is half the battle. Make sure your pay is at least in the right postcode for the market, because nothing drives a good person out faster than feeling quietly underpaid. Then go past the money. Give people room to grow, real recognition and a workload that does not grind them down. Watch your best people in particular, because they are the most capable, the most poached and often the quietest about being unhappy. Keeping the skills you have is almost always cheaper than replacing them.

Grow your own

Since you cannot always buy the skills you need, the most reliable answer is to build them. Most of this costs far less than owners assume. Train people on the job, stretch them with work just beyond their reach and back them while they grow into it. Pair newer people with your experienced hands so knowledge passes on rather than walking out the door. Use the short courses, the supplier training and the apprenticeship and funding support available in New Zealand rather than carrying every cost yourself. Cross-train so no single skill lives in one head. Grown talent is loyal talent, because people rarely leave the place that invested in them.

What would you do?

Picture being ready to expand, with no skilled people in your industry to be found. Your best employees are already overloaded and you can see that if nothing changes, one of them will crack or quit and make the shortage worse. The temptation is to keep advertising the same role and wait. Try the steps instead. Run a quick skills audit to work out which gaps actually matter. Widen the search beyond the local pool and consider remote or part-time help. Sharpen what makes you worth joining and protect the skilled people you already have. Most of all, start growing your own through on-the-job training and mentoring. Do that and you stop competing for scarce talent on price and start building the team you could not hire.

“The strongest businesses are not the ones that always find the talent. They are the ones that grow it.”

A skills shortage feels like a wall, but it is really a fork in the road. One way is to keep bidding for rare talent you cannot afford and losing. The other is to get deliberate, work out which skills truly matter, widen how you attract people, hold on to the ones you have and build the rest from within. That second road is slower, but it is the one that future-proofs the business, because a team you have grown is a team that stays, learns and carries you forward. Solve the shortage by building talent, not just chasing it.

Next in the series, how to hold on to your best people when a competitor decides they want them too.