A colleague attended the National Chicken Council’s annual meeting recently. She shared with me the transcription of a presentation to the group by Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes Magazine.

In his address, Karlgaard discussed the psychographics of successful hiring, a perennial topic of interest to processors, for whom recruiting and retention is always a sticking point.

Speaking of an insurance company that he had researched for a book, he noted, “They like [to hire] the tough people… [g]ritty women …" for the sales force, where rejection is a big part of the job.

Karlgaard said, “They like the women who married the bum and the bum left them with debts and kids somewhere in their 30s and they’ve got to make money. They’ve gotta make money or they are going on welfare. What else are they going to do? Not surprisingly, those women have a great deal of focus and they can take rejection. And they have proven very valuable. So [the insurance company has] a huge outreach program to women, but they are kind of out of the corner of their eye looking for a certain kind of woman.”

Even though insurance sales is a far cry from the cutting line, the observation holds parallels to processors’ woes. Processors benefit from hiring a certain type of employee, too.

Gritty.

Or, put another way, desperate.

Until the day a meat processing job pays $50/hour, the labor pool that processors draw from is often a desperate one: Immigrants (some of whom are hiding their illegal status), prisoners and ex-cons, refugees from murderous hotspots like Somalia and Myanmar, recovering drug addicts. As the insurance company’s execs have learned, employees living in such tenuous circumstances can be star workers.

But let’s be clear here: These are fragile populations living fragile lives. It's a thin line between providing gainful employment and exploitation.

Most meat processors are on the right side of that line. They pay a market wage for the work, the same market wage regardless of an employee’s life story. If the work isn’t to their liking, or doesn’t pay enough to meet the bills, that employee is free to look for work elsewhere. It’s the simplest of economic exchanges.

Some processors go far beyond that exchange to provide English classes, financial advisory services, help with day care, tuition reimbursement and scholarships, access to counseling for PTSD and the like — practically acting as a social services agency. What may seem like employer overreach is welcome when the facility is in small towns and rural areas where such services are scarce.

Then there are the processors who hire workers in desperate circumstances simply because they know those folks don’t have other options. They’ll do unpleasant work in uncomfortable circumstances, and the company can pay as little as possible. And as for the high turnover? Well, there’s no shortage of desperate people.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably not in this latter category. You want to do right by your employees. So do one thing more for them: Find out what the biggest problems are for your most vulnerable workers, and explore options for addressing the issues. Not to fix them, but to provide access to the services and mentors to lead them to their own solutions.

There are two reasons to do this, even if your operation is well-run and profitable. First, doing more than the next guy makes your company a more desirable place to work, and you will find a better labor pool available to you. And second, in pursuit of the American dream, so that 15 years from now, some of their kids will be the ones doing the hiring.

What does it mean to look for workers with 'grit'?

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