I have never quite understood the practice of recruiting people while suppressing wages.
A company hires people to take on business that can create value. This means that reasonable labor costs should be covered by business growth, rather than becoming the primary source of pressure on corporate profits.
Conversely, if a business constantly needs to cut labor costs, it indicates that the profit margin is extremely low and requires all kinds of savings. So why are you hiring someone in the first place?
Because in my view, recruitment is a very important part of operations. You want the people you bring in to bring higher revenue, faster efficiency, more stable delivery, or solve problems you couldn't solve before in the coming period.
But many business owners still think primarily about cost when hiring. How much does this person cost? Can it be cheaper? For the same position, can I find someone who asks for a lower salary? Reducing the salary from 10,000 to 8,000 saves 24,000 a year.
There's nothing wrong with that calculation. The problem is that it only calculates input, not output.
What operators really care about is input-output ratio, certainty, and ceiling. If you treat people as costs, you will instinctively drive down prices. If you treat people as operational nodes, you will seriously calculate what results this money can bring.
This is also reflected in the issue of wage suppression. It easily traps business owners into focusing on the cost side, putting all their energy into lowering costs, while rarely thinking seriously about how to make that position generate greater returns.
So I believe that when it comes to recruitment, the best way to save money is not to hire at all.
Cost thinking and operational thinking are two completely different mental models.
Many business owners fiercely negotiate when hiring, thinking they are clever. But have they ever considered another possibility: your business simply isn't profitable, which is why you have to pinch pennies on people?
If a business can only squeeze out profits by suppressing wages, what's the point of doing that business?
Take an egg as an example. An egg in a farmers' market is only worth a few dimes. Its value is to be bought by a consumer and eaten in one bite.
As a chicken farm owner, if you want to make more money from selling eggs, you have to continuously optimize costs. Can the feed be cheaper? Can labor be reduced? Can transportation losses be lowered? It's possible, but the room is very limited. Because as long as you're still selling ordinary eggs to be eaten, the market will continue to price them as ordinary eggs.
Then someone took a different approach.
They combined an egg with an incubator, instructions, and an observation log, turning a few-dime egg into a children's educational product worth over a hundred yuan.
The egg hasn't changed; what changed is the positioning, the scenario, and the reason to buy. In the farmers' market, parents buy food. In the children's education scenario, parents buy the experience of their child observing the hatching process, the wait for the chick to break out, a parent-child experience to participate in, record, and share.
That's the difference between a commodity and a product.
A commodity answers "What is this used for?" A product answers "Who does it solve what problem for, and what value does it provide in what scenario?" Eggs are just a commodity; eggs plus an incubator, operating procedures, educational content, and parent-child experience form a complete product. The former is priced according to raw materials; the latter is priced according to the value the user gains.
The thing hasn't changed, but the scenario has, and so has the value judgment.
The same goes for hiring.
It's hard to evaluate a person's value separately from the business scenario. The same employee placed in a business with a unit price of a few hundred yuan versus a business with a unit price of hundreds of thousands of yuan can create results that differ by more than an order of magnitude.
So when a business owner feels an employee is expensive, the problem may not lie with the employee, but with the business line to which that position belongs, which can no longer accommodate reasonable labor costs.
If spending an extra one or two thousand yuan on a position eats up the company's profit, what really needs to be reviewed is not whether the person is worth that price, but whether the business itself still has profit margin.
Business owners who truly make big money will also control costs, but they won't focus their main energy on the cost side. There is an upper limit to saving money; only redefining value can bring profit growth.
Next time before hiring, ask yourself two questions:
How much return can this position actually generate?
If the return is not high enough, is this person too expensive, or is the value of this business too low?
A business owner's biggest cost is not paying an extra two thousand in salary, but spending a lot of energy haggling with others without spending any time thinking about how to make the business more valuable.