Reply #5: Bingo... the key to gaining maximum profit from your assets (employees) is trapping employees. [View All]

When an employee is "overqualified" you can't give them shit because they'll up and leave. Even moreso once the economy turns around. You're not the only game in town that can use their services and they have skills to move elswhere (or move up the corporate ladder).

The key is getting an employee with the minimum skillsets needed to do the job just barely adequetely. Then you can get away with screwing them more because they are, in essence, stuck. Nothing sucks more than training employees only to have to waste money training new employees just a few months later because your McDonald's fry cook finally found a logistics programming job.

I have a friend who flips/rents properties (mostly sectino * gov't assisted housing) and he has oodles of workers who work for about $9/hour in cash doing everything from refinishing & tiling floors to remodelling kitchens and rewiring houses. We're talking refinishing entire bathrooms in little more than 1 day. Most of his workers have criminal or some other adverse pasts, are very poor with handling money, post-workers compensation, can't drive, drink too much, ... whatever. But they can follow instructions (monkey see monkey do). He chooses people like this on purpose (actually turning down experienced applicants) because he knows once he hires someone they'll be "stuck" with him. Reliable & cheap hard workers (albeit barely satisfactory quality) and all he has to do is pay them a tad more than minimum wage.