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A sign advertising job openings is seen outside of a Starbucks in Manhattan, New York City, New York, U.S., May 26, 2021.

Andrew Kelly | Reuters

The labor shortage has forced businesses both big and small to find new and creative ways to attract workers.

Half of the small business owners polled in the Q3 2021 CNBC | Momentive Small Business Survey say it’s harder to find qualified people to hire compared to a year ago. Slightly less than one-third of respondents, or 31%, say they have open roles they have not been able to fill for at least three months, up from 24% last quarter and 16% in Q1 2020.

While there are signs the shortage could be subsiding — hiring in July rose at its fastest pace in nearly a year — recent data suggests there are one million more jobs available than people searching for them. In total, there are more than 10 million job openings, the highest level on record according to the Labor Department.

Inability to hire needed staff is hitting businesses where it counts: revenue opportunities. The National Federation of Independent Businesses is seeing the labor shortage translate into lost sales among it member companies, said Holly Wade, NFIB executive director of research, speaking at Wednesday’s CNBC Small Business Playbook event.

The biggest companies are now looking for ways to stand out to job seekers. Chipotle Mexican Grill and McDonald’s have boosted pay, while Target and Walmart have expanded tuition reimbursement programs to help employees pay for higher education.  

Small business owners may not be able to keep up with deep-pocketed large corporations in a race over wages and benefits, but they can find success in labor market using technology tools that allow them to connect with job applicants, such as LinkedIn.

Here are some key strategies for standing out in the search for workers, according to talent experts who spoke at the CNBC Small Business Playbook event.

1. Go beyond just posting a job

It’s critical for businesses to have a digital presence and a strong brand not only to attract customers but also to attract talent, said LinkedIn vice president of product Gyanda Sachdeva.

Sachdeva said that LinkedIn data suggests that job seekers engage with a potential employer’s brand for months before they apply for a position.

“It’s important that you set up a page for a digital presence, and use it to reflect your values, your purpose, your mission in society, and let job seekers have a preview into what it would feel like working at your company,” Sachdeva said.

Amid the tight labor market, job seekers are looking deeper into companies to see if they would be a fit, putting culture even more front and center as a potential pull for workers.

“If you have a company culture that stands out from peers and other competitors, it’s a great asset to talk about and explain,” Sachdeva said. “The more people start to see your company as more than a brand, the more they see the thought leaders and see who the people are who are propping the company up.”

2. Highlight the right people

While it’s critical for a business to have a digital presence, sending the right message is just as important.

Nina Vaca, Pinnacle Group Chairman & CEO, said that businesses should use their social media presences to “communicate not what you think people want to hear, but what your values truly are.”

That means the messaging should go beyond just the CEO, Vaca said, allowing other employees to speak up and share their experiences.

“Nobody speaks louder than your current people and how they really feel about working at your company,” Vaca said. “It’s important to be transparent about your values because you’re recruiting people to your business — recruiting in the essence of the word is about outlook, it’s about combining the right people with the right opportunity.”

3. Build an interactive community

While just having a LinkedIn page is important, building that page into a community hub can help elevate a business even further.

Sachdeva said that the community could be focused on current or future customers, current or future employees, or both.

The easiest way to start to build that community is by being active on the platform and having people engage.

For example, RTC Road and Traffic Engineering, a Dubai-based 44-person civil engineering company, creating a LinkedIn post that included all of its current job openings and asked for followers to apply if interested as well as share with others. The post received more than 1,400 reactions and 1,000 comments, Sachdeva said.

“So with a single post they were not only able to get their brand awareness up, but also many people raising their hands and expressing interest in working with them,” she said.

Another company focused on creating training resources for product management hosted its entire annual conference on LinkedIn Live, Sachdeva said. That helped the 16-person company receive more than 1,000 comments during the live session.

“They all wanted to learn more, hopefully becoming future customers and some people becoming future employees,” Sachdeva said.

4. Be upfront about work-from-home plans

There is no hotter topic for potential employees than what a business has planned for workers in terms of work-from-home, hybrid accommodations, or coming back to the office. Businesses should use this as an opportunity to be upfront and transparent about what those plans are, Sachdeva said.

“It’s actually a conversation that people want to have, and if your organization has a specific policy around this, it’s worth sharing and talking about so people can chime in and share their feedback,” she said. “It’s not a conversation in the background anymore, and I’d highly recommend that it’s discussed in job postings on the company page and even having the CEO talk about it.”

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

The Delta-Covid variant has spread so quickly in the US that most counties in the country now meet CDC guidelines that recommend wearing masks indoors – whether they are vaccinated or not.

“We continue to see an increase in cases, hospitals, hospital admissions and deaths across the country. And now over 90% of the counties in the United States are experiencing significant or high transmission, ”Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters at a briefing Thursday. “As we said earlier, by far the most vulnerable people remain who have not yet been vaccinated.”

The CDC updated its mask guidelines on July 27 to recommend indoor masks in areas of the United States where community transmission was considered high or significant. Most of the counties with high transmission rates were in the southern United States, but in two weeks the proliferation of the highly transmittable delta variant expanded to most counties across the country.

The CDC recorded 132,384 new cases of Covid on Wednesday and hit a seven-day average of about 113,000 cases per day, up nearly 24% from the previous week, it said. Hospital admissions also rose about 31% in the previous week to about 9,700 per day.

Unvaccinated Americans make up the overwhelming majority of hospital admissions and deaths across the country, she said.

Several coastal cities with high vaccination rates on both sides of the United States have mandated vaccinations for indoor activities such as restaurants, bars, and gyms to prevent further spread of the Delta variant. New York City requires at least one dose of indoor activity vaccine, and San Francisco requires full vaccination with a two-dose vaccine or one dose of a single-dose vaccine.

In the hardest hit states, vaccination rates are increasing as residents take precautions against the spread of the Delta variant. The average number of daily shots tripled in Arkansas last month and quadrupled in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, Jeffrey Zients, White House coordinator of coronavirus response, said at the briefing.

“To end this pandemic, every American must do their part. So please, if you are not vaccinated, get your vaccination … it has never been more important, ”said Zients.

The rise of the delta variant, a highly contagious strain of Covid-19, is disrupting reopening plans across the country and introducing even more uncertainty on Main Street. Nearly six in 10 small business owners in the latest CNBC | Momentive Small Business Survey say the new threat is making them shift their business outlook for the rest of 2021.

Overall small business confidence, as measured in the survey of more than 2,000 small business owners conducted July 26 – August 3, remains underwater at a score of 45 out of 100, well below its pre-pandemic level of 61 in the first quarter of 2020. That score is unchanged from last quarter’s survey, when daily Covid-19 case rates were about half of what they are now.

The new wave of Covid rushing across the country is leading to increases in the hospitalization rates and death rates nationwide, but especially in areas with lower vaccination rates. Some hospitals are as overburdened now as they were in April of last year, when Covid-19 was first spreading in the U.S.

This is happening just as American society was beginning to fully return to its pre-pandemic routines. A Gallup poll conducted in June, before the delta variant wave surged, found that two-thirds of adults in the U.S. said their lives are either “somewhat” or “completely” back to normal, up from 37% last fall. 

Delta disrupts a total return to normal

Small businesses have learned how to get by in this environment. Restaurants pivoted to carry-out instead of dine-in, brick-and-mortar retailers invested in creating online storefronts, and gyms began offering virtual workouts. 

After a year and a half’s experience adapting to these ever-changing circumstances, 66% of small business owners in the latest CNBC | Momentive poll say they can continue operating for more than a year under current business conditions — unchanged from three months prior. 

One significant advantage now relative to earlier phases of the pandemic is that few cities and states are resorting to full-scale shutdowns or curfews to manage the increase in cases. That means the restaurants, hair salons, and shops that rely on in-person foot traffic can continue to keep their doors open. 

Barbers Roni Baba and Michael Nasimov cut hair with a protective face masks between plastic separations as phase two reopening continues during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at Joseph Hair Salon in Port Washington, New York, June 11, 2020.

Shannon Stapleton | Reuters

So far, consumers are happy to return to their pre-pandemic lives. In a new Washington Post-Schar School poll, 76% of people say they’ve eaten indoors at a restaurant, 74% have visited a doctor or dentist’s office, and 55% have gotten a haircut in a barber shop or hair salon within the past three months.  

While most small businesses have been coping, and some even thriving in this new environment, there are still many who are holding out hope for a return to their 2019 “business as usual.” 

Just about half of small business owners in the arts, entertainment, and recreation industry (48%) say they can continue to survive for another year given current business conditions — the lowest of any industry. These are some of the businesses caught in the crosshairs of the delta variant. 

While many people had been excited to return to concerts, clubs, and more frivolous activities this summer and fall, the sharp rise in Covid-19 cases is forcing the cancellation of some of those long-delayed reopening plans. After a year without concerts, baseball games, and daily commutes into the office, many people are realizing they can continue to structure their lives differently than they had before. 

Vaccinations have accelerated the reopening

What’s different about this latest Covid wave? Vaccinations. More than two-thirds of adults in the U.S. have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, and those who have been fully vaccinated are largely protected from the worst effects of the virus. Covid-19 now poses so much greater a risk to those who haven’t yet received a shot that the Biden administration has described the current situation as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” 

In earlier waves of the pandemic, local governments resorted to curfews and total shutdowns of businesses in order to curb the spread of the virus. Now, much more lenient policies are being implemented instead. 

New York City will soon mandate that restaurants, bars, gyms, and other businesses require patrons to show proof of vaccination before coming inside. Meanwhile, some of the country’s largest employers and biggest brand names — Walmart, Disney, United Airlines — are beginning to require their workers to show proof of vaccination before they return to work in-person. 

Even with these more relaxed changes, the surge in cases driven by the delta variant may cause people to reassess what they’re comfortable doing day-to-day. In our CNBC | Momentive poll, 25% of those in the general public say they’re changing their outlook for the rest of 2021 “a lot,” 41% say it has changed only “a little,” and 32% haven’t changed their outlook “at all.” 

Even with increased mask adoption and vaccine passports, the public’s concerns about the delta variant could still shift as the perceived risk ebbs and flows. Small businesses will have to continue to adapt. 

In this photo illustration, a woman has a syringe in her arm

NurPhoto | NurPhoto | Getty Images

LONDON – Achieving herd immunity with Covid vaccines when the highly contagious Delta variant spreads is “not an option,” said a senior epidemiologist.

Experts agree on several reasons why such a goal – to achieve total immunity in a population and stop the virus from spreading – is not likely.

Sir Andrew Pollard, head of the Oxford Vaccine Group, told UK lawmakers Tuesday that the idea of ​​achieving herd immunity as Covid vaccines did not completely stop the spread of the virus – as vaccinated people can still become infected and can transmit the virus – the idea was to achieve herd immunity. mythical.”

“I think we are in a situation here with this current variant where herd immunity is not possible because it is still infecting people who have been vaccinated,” said Pollard, a lead researcher in the development of the AstraZeneca-University of Oxford vaccine .

“And that means that anyone who is still unvaccinated will encounter the virus at some point. It might not be this month or next month, it could be next year, but at some point they will encounter the virus and we don’t have something to stop that transmission. “

Read more: Fully vaccinated people are still infected with Covid. Experts explain why

What is Herd Immunity?

Put simply, herd immunity refers to the idea that both natural infection (through the formation of antibodies when fighting a virus) and vaccination can achieve high immunity to a virus in a population.

The latter method is preferred because, unlike the natural route of infection, vaccines produce predominantly immunity without causing disease or adverse health complications.

The antibodies obtained through natural infection and vaccination usually protect against future infection. When enough people in a population are immune, it leads to a lower prevalence of disease or virus in a community. When a virus has fewer opportunities to spread and infect it can be tightly controlled or even eradicated.

In herd immunity, those who are not vaccinated (be it voluntarily or because they cannot be vaccinated at some point – for example, newborns) are protected by the overall level of immunity in a population.

Successful mass vaccination programs have resulted in deadly, contagious viruses and diseases such as polio, tuberculosis and measles being largely eradicated in parts of the world or being severely suppressed by vaccination programs and the herd immunity they promote.

Pollard noted on Tuesday that Covid and the current virulent Delta variant are different. “The problem with this virus is this [it is] no measles. If 95% of people were vaccinated against measles, the virus cannot be spread in the population, ”he told the UK all-party parliamentary group on the coronavirus.

Pollard said that while Covid vaccines could slow the spread of the virus – because in studies fully vaccinated but infected people shed fewer viruses, giving the virus less opportunity to spread – new variants would likely emerge that would spread as well.

“I suspect that the virus will next produce a variant that may be even better transmitted among vaccinated populations.

People who are fully vaccinated are highly protected from serious infection, hospitalization, and death from the virus. New research from the UK, released on Friday, also showed that people who were double-vaccinated were three times less likely to test positive for the coronavirus than those who were not. The study, led by Imperial College London, also found that fully vaccinated people may be less likely to pass the virus on to others than those who are not.

Experts urge all unvaccinated people to come forward, but problems are emerging in some countries in Europe and the US because younger adults are not taking the vaccine.

Dr. Andrew Freedman, an infectious disease reader at Cardiff Medical School, told CNBC Thursday that he agreed with Pollard’s assessment that herd immunity was unlikely.

“The Delta variant is highly transmissible, which means the proportion of people who will need to be fully vaccinated against herd immunity is unlikely to be achievable,” he said. “The vaccines offer very effective protection against serious illness / hospitalization / death, but are less effective in preventing infections, mild illnesses and transmission, especially with the Delta variant.”

In countries like the UK, herd immunity is also unlikely due to the large pool of unvaccinated adolescents and children – some of whom have immunity after natural infection, but most of whom do not, Freedman said.

“But even without complete ‘herd immunity’, the higher the percentage of the fully vaccinated population, the lower the infection rate in the community,” he said.

Herd immunity problems

As the coronavirus pandemic spread around the world in 2020, a number of governments, such as those in Sweden and the UK, seemed ready to put their hopes on the concept of “herd immunity” and willing to allow the virus to spread among populations so that a natural immunity can build up.

The approach was quickly abandoned by the UK, however, as it quickly became apparent how deadly and destructive Covid could be, with thousands of infections resulting in hospitalizations and deaths threatening to overwhelm the healthcare system.

Achieving herd immunity to Covid is viewed as much more difficult for several other reasons, including uneven vaccine introductions, vaccination hesitation, and mutation of the virus, with new variants threatening (but not yet undermining) the effectiveness of the Covid vaccine.

Read more: Will herd immunity ever be possible with the spread of Covid mutations?

In addition, experts do not yet know how long immunity to Covid will last, although there is clinical evidence that immunity to the virus wanes over time.

Medical staff from the Delta Health Center will be waiting on Jan.

Spencer Platt | Getty Images

Studies show that the Covid vaccines used in Europe and the US are still highly effective in preventing serious infections, hospitalizations and deaths. While there are indications of so-called breakthrough cases of Covid in fully vaccinated people, these cases are rare and tend to be milder.

Danny Altmann, professor of immunology at Imperial College London, told CNBC that he also agrees with Pollard and that the mathematical model of herd immunity cannot simply be applied to an “unprecedented” virus like Covid, which with divergent, globally circulating variants still little will be understood arising.

“The whole herd immunity thing was one of those pieces of medical textbook language that was adopted early by policy advisers, then by the press, then by the public, and consistently skewed and oversimplified,” he said Thursday.

According to Altmann, it is important that “the more people in the world are effectively vaccinated, the fewer virus copies we will have on the planet, i.e. the less spread and fewer lungs in which the virus will mutate and the next wave of variants.”