If you’re a business decision-maker, there’s a better-than-average chance you’ve encountered your share of hiring woes in recent years. Recruiting the right talent for your workforce – and then keeping them – has become a challenge across almost all industries in nearly all markets. Understanding the trends other businesses like yours are seeing can help you adjust current strategies and anticipate future needs. Here’s four key stats to get you started:
Your reputation matters, and it could be hurting your recruitment efforts.
55% of job seekers abandon applications after reading negative reviews online, according to TalentNow.
Job prospects flock to hiring sites like Indeed or Glassdoor, where they can access business reviews from current and former employees rating factors like work/life balance, compensation/benefits, job security and culture at your organization. How often do you monitor your profile and reviews on hiring sites, social media and other web-based platforms that applicants may be accessing? In today’s digital world, reputation monitoring and management is an important part of any recruitment strategy. Not only can a positive reputation help you attract the best candidates to your workforce, but monitoring what current and former employees say about your business can help you identify and address trends in internal problems.
Your internal culture matters to current, and future, employees.
60% of Americans would take a job they love over a job they hate, even if the salary was 50% lower.***
Retention is the other side of the recruitment coin – once you’ve made good hires, you want to keep them. Corporate culture has been closely linked to workforce satisfaction and productivity, so make sure you’ve invested in development and implementation of your business’s culture and values, and that they’re being upheld at every level of your organization.
Your best candidates already have a job elsewhere, but you can still recruit them.
86% of the most qualified candidates are already employed elsewhere and aren’t actively seeking employment.*
If you’re still recruiting the way you were five years ago, you may be missing out on key opportunities for reaching great candidates – especially if your business is in a market with low unemployment rates. Passive recruitment tactics – placing job ads and waiting for candidates to come looking for you – isn’t effective if your best applicants aren’t actively seeking a job. But just because they’re not looking, doesn’t mean they aren’t interested. This is where social and digital strategies come into play, targeting those demographics or attributes that make good employees, even if they aren’t actively seeking employment.
You can be competitive on the hiring field without having the highest pay scale.
80% of employees would prefer new or additional benefits over a salary increase.*
Salary isn’t always the highest priority for candidates. In fact, 50% of candidates say they wouldn’t work for a company with a bad reputation, even for a pay increase.* And the top reasons employees give for leaving their jobs include: Lack of career development (22%); Lack of work/life balance (12%); poor management (11%) and unsatisfactory compensation (9%).** If you aren’t winning the salary race (or even if you are), focus your recruitment efforts on internal culture and benefits over payscale to set yourself apart from the hiring competition and connect with job prospects on what matters most to them.
*TalentNow
**WorkInstitute
***LexingtonLaw