3 Key Hiring Tactics for High-Risk Industries
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Talent pools are drying up across high-risk industries like public safety and critical infrastructure sectors (e.g., energy and nuclear). According to the National Institute of Building Sciences, the construction industry will need 439,000 new workers to meet demand in 2025. Staffing at many police and fire departments has reached historic lows.
Available evidence suggests these trends will continue. Younger workers prioritize considerations like work/life balance, low stress, and high flexibility in their jobs — things that high-risk industries aren’t historically known to offer.
While high-risk employers cannot change the nature of their work, they can get creative with recruiting and retention tactics. Organizations that act now can gain a long-term advantage over their competitors.
What’s driving talent shortages in high-risk industries?
High-risk employers must first identify the challenges they face before determining how to adapt their recruiting strategies. Three factors are at play:
Low interest: Stress and safety concerns have always made hiring trickier in high-risk industries. Evolving employee expectations around work/life balance and wellness, especially among millennials and Generation Z, have made it even harder.
Lack of skills: Candidates interested in applying for high-risk roles may lack the necessary qualifications. Consider a field like underwater welding: It requires a very niche skill set that a person can’t easily pick up in school or an unrelated field.
High attrition: Burnout, injury, and less-than-ideal work arrangements drive many workers out of high-risk fields long before the end of their careers.
These factors arise from the very nature of high-risk work. Mines cannot operate remotely. Paramedics require special skills. Fighting fires carries the risk of injury.
But by adapting hiring techniques to these realities, organizations can build the talent pools they need to succeed.
Tactics for recruiting more—and better—talent in high-risk industries
The basics — competitive compensation packages — still matter. However, organizations that go beyond these things stand to gain the most.
Employers can focus on three key areas: active recruiting, passive recruiting, and retention.
1. Active recruiting: Building the team you want
Active recruiting means putting in some legwork to find candidates rather than posting a job ad and waiting for people to come to you.
The quintessential active recruiting techniques are direct outreach and headhunting. High-risk employers can go further. Instead of just searching for candidates, organizations can build the candidates they need through strategic talent development pipelines.
Essentially, this entails partnering with military transition programs, technical schools, universities, and similar institutions to create internships, scholarships, and apprenticeships to train the next generation of workers.
Talent development programs can help kill two birds with one stone. They address skills shortages, of course, but they can also tackle waning interest. They give candidates a lower-commitment way to scope out a field they might not have otherwise considered.
Most importantly, these programs work. For example, the American Public Power Association reports that the U.S. energy industry has dramatically increased its pool of young talent by investing heavily in “energy education pathways” in high schools and higher ed.
2. Passive recruiting: Telling the right story
Passive recruiting entails building a strong employer brand that attracts candidates to the organization. This, it turns out, is one of the most effective ways to find talent. Universum reports that organizations with strong employer brands attract more qualified candidates overall.
At its core, passive recruitment is about storytelling — specifically, telling a story about what the organization stands for and what it has to offer.
High-risk industries have an edge here. High-risk work tends to be socially critical work: ensuring public safety, responding to disasters, and maintaining essential infrastructure. That’s one of the reasons why people still do it, despite the danger.
Due to its importance, this work is unlikely to disappear, regardless of economic and societal fluctuations, making it a safe and reliable bet compared to many other professions.
Organizations in high-risk industries should emphasize their missions — the bigger meaning of what they do. To make the story even more compelling, they can tie the mission to practical benefits that help employees on a personal level. Think: Cutting-edge upskilling and robust mental health resources.
The story of high-risk work should be a win-win: A win for the world and a win for the worker.
3. Retention: Setting people up for success
Consider two of the biggest drivers of turnover across all industries: burnout and lack of development.
Employees who feel burned out are three times more likely to look for a new job, and career development issues are the most common reason employees leave their roles.
Employers cannot eliminate all the burnout-causing stress of high-risk work, but they can take creative approaches to make it more manageable. For example, offering world-class health and wellness services on-site would make these resources more accessible and more usable.
Similarly, while it can be hard to strike the right work/life balance in high-risk roles, employers can experiment with adding flexibility in new ways. Developments in autonomous and AI-powered equipment could open up remote work possibilities previously thought impossible.
As for career development, employees must have access to continuous upskilling beyond strategic programs to train new people. One approach could be pairing new hires with seasoned veterans who can act as their guides for the long term — and train them as replacements, creating a self-replenishing talent pipeline.
Get creative today to win in the future
If one thread runs through all of the above, it’s this: High-risk employers don’t need to completely reinvent hiring, but they do need to get creative with the elements at their disposal. The organizations that start experimenting with new approaches today will set themselves up for success far into the future.
Discover how Pearson’s assessment solutions can support recruiting in high-risk industries by identifying the right candidates for demanding roles. Contact us today to learn more about our empirically validated tools and how they can enhance your hiring process.