Insider Tips: Engaging And Retaining Your Cannabis Workforce Amid Financial Hardships

Restricted industry capital calls for new considerations on fundamental topics such as innovative frameworks for the relationship between employers and employees.

Aiming for a diversified debate, Benzinga’s Cannabis Capital Conference invited recruiting network Vangst's CEO Karson Humiston, longtime cannabis attorney Denise Pollicella and Sensi CEO Jamie Cooper as moderator, to dive into necessary changes and existing challenges.

Layoffs, An Unprecedented Trend

Earlier this week, Humiston’s company released its annual cannabis industry report on state-by-state jobs creation. She says this was the first year since 2017 with no jobs created but rather subtracted. 

She said the 2% YoY drop -from 428,000 to 417,000 full-time workers - owes to a number of factors, including general economic hurdles for businesses yet hitting harder on cannabis. 

Many large cannabis brands consequently reduced their workforce, noticeably in states like California and Colorado. Yet some of the newer markets like Missouri or Michigan -the nº2 job market in the US - and New Jersey, hired more employees, positively counterbalancing the final figure.

For Humiston, some level of state industry reform is necessary for businesses to fully operate, providing people with jobs and the government with taxes as was originally meant to do.

Hiring The Right Person

Specialized lawyer Pollicella says her cannabis clients sometimes struggle to remember that cannabis is a business like any other. 

Her consulting experience taught her that “it's really difficult to know that you're hiring the right person with a piece of paper.” As recommendations cannot be requested without risking a lawsuit at least, she jokingly suggested stalking prospective employees. 

She also discourages straight-out contracting: “Get to know them, see how they work with your culture and with your company first, without getting too lawyerly.”

Get legal advice, though. The worst thing a new company can do, she says, is to get their essential legal information from the Internet. Being informed on the formal aspects of labor relationships is “much less expensive” than calling a lawyer when things go wrong. 

Foreseeing 2024

The industry’s reset, with more mature markets settling in and scaling back growth projections while becoming resilient with their own capital, all bode well for the future. 

“We have a super bright future ahead of us. A lot of businesses are dying or about to be dead, but for the people that make it through to the other side, the reward is going to be huge. I mean, cannabis is going to be one of the largest consumer product spaces in the U.S. and globally, and everyone wants to be part of that,” Humiston concluded.

Photo: Benzinga edit with photo by Iryna Rahalskaya on Shutterstock.