To Hire or Not to Hire
by Jack Guarnieri, Jersey Jack Pinball & PinballSales.com
Are you hiring in this economic climate? Some of my friends who own businesses aren’t hiring anyone while others are only hiring key, vital people. Essentially, these are hires that will just keep the lights on with many not hiring the people who will bring growth and new business.
With a manufacturing company, it seems you’re always looking for good people, those who show up, have a positive attitude when doing their jobs, are open to learning new things, and working well with others.
Is it better to hire someone and expend the time and effort to train them or hire a more seasoned and experienced worker at a higher rate of pay? The answer depends on your budget and goals. If you want a more immediate result, you’ll probably need to hire experience rather than spend the time to “build” someone.
Work ethics vary from generation to generation. Baby Boomers were more likely to stay at one job for decades while other generations are more likely to job hop after a few years. With that in mind, will a worker stick around long enough for you to benefit from the time and money spent training them?
If you don’t have years to work with, take a shortcut and hire experience from your competitors. Go find the diamonds that have been overlooked. Give them the opportunity to shine again and to be truly appreciated and treated well. Give them the chance to grow and try the ideas they’ve had that have likely been suppressed or ignored.
If you put fences around people, you’ll get sheep. Take the fences down and let those people have some freedom. Sometimes they’ll make mistakes but to mitigate that, be sure to have them keep you or another superior in the loop so they don’t go too far offroad.
I believe you should hire from your own industry, especially when that industry is the amusement game business. I’ve seen companies hire from both inside and outside, and I’ve got to say I’ve seen very limited success from the people who’ve come into our industry from another, applying their generally accepted business practices to ours.
Most other industries have regulations, guidelines and rigid guardrails on the roadway. Ours is made of many creative people who simply don’t respond well or thrive when too many limitations are placed upon them. They need the freedom to create and innovate, which is what keeps our games fun for customers. Outsiders brought into leadership positions in our industry tend to look at the way we do things and set out to “fix” them, bringing structure and common sense to daily business operations. I haven’t seen that approach be successful in the long-term.
That said, our industry does need new people to come into it so it can continue and thrive. The veterans need to do more than just cash out and retire. They need to bring new blood to the industry and mentor them. By helping them learn the ropes, what our industry is and what it brings to the fabric of the world, these newbies can help keep our industry bringing fun to the world for many more generations.
Yes, there is always a risk and expense in hiring new employees, but there may be a bigger risk in not hiring. Piling more work on your current employees without upping their compensation is a recipe for unhappy employees. It can also be the recipe for burnout.
If you’re interested in statistics, I read that the national unemployment rate for March of this year was 4.2%, representing a slight increase from February (it’s also reportedly the highest since Nov. 2024). There were 7.1 million unemployed people with a “labor force participation rate” of 62.5%.
My advice is to keep your eyes wide open, especially in the next few months. Be nimble and leave your options open so you can take advantage of opportunities to grow your business and your market share.
Jack Guarnieri started servicing electromechanical pinball machines in 1975 and has been involved in every phase of the amusement game business since then. He was an operator in NYC, then began a distributorship in 1999, PinballSales.com, selling coin-op to the consumer market. In January of 2011, he founded Jersey Jack Pinball (named after his RePlay Magazine pen name), which builds award-winning, full-featured, coin-op pinball machines. Email Jack at [email protected].