People think the labor shortage in logistics happened because of the pandemic, but it actually started back in 2003, says Jennifer Sheets, chief executive officer and president of MasterStaff. 

“It’s been going on for 20 years, and we keep doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result,” Sheets says. She believes the major error is trying to deploy new technologies as if humans are as interchangeable as machine parts. “We’re relying on all this technology to make it faster and better to find people, yet in 2022 we had the great resignation. We have to start rethinking how we’re looking at this.”

The labor shortage problems that are specific to the logistics industry are primarily in entry-level jobs, and a cookie-cutter approach to hiring just doesn’t cut it. Sheets says it’s no good treating hiring at disparate facilities as if they’re the same — one of your warehouses might be right next to several others that offer higher wages or better working conditions. “In the supply chain, we try to make it all one thing, so we have a line item on our profit and loss statement,” she says.

The solution is to “go glocal,” she says. That means going back to the people you hired in the first place and giving them a say in how you hire for those locations and positions, using their connections and insights to seek out suitable employees.

“They know better than anybody else,” Sheets says. “It’s okay to streamline the process, and to find a tool like [a customer relationship management] system, but when it comes to making that decision, does the technology company that programmed it know what’s down the road from where you’re hiring people?”

If you take a blanket approach, you’re going to miss a lot of potential workers, Sheets says. “The human connection is the lifeline. Stop taking the most important thing in your company and reducing it down to an algorithm.”