Pay, Perks, and Job Satisfaction: 5 Tips for Attracting and Retaining Workers

Unemployment is at record lows, and Baby Boomers are leaving the workforce at increasing rates. For companies that are struggling to fill roles, they should look to current employees to make lateral moves to help fill the void. However, companies need to know how to retain workers in order to keep them around.

Fortunately, the new Ladders report, Beyond the Resume: Motivations for the Big Move, offers advice on how to attract and retain workers, specifically for recruiters and hiring managers. The report highlights data findings from the Third Page survey platform, which collected more than 2 million answers to questions from more than 16,500 jobseeker members. Key findings from this report are highlighted below.

Hiring and Succession Planning

If you’re looking to hire unemployed candidates right out of college, think again! According to the Beyond the Resume report, the candidate pool is extremely tight, with only 1.8 graduates out of every 100 available for open positions.
The Beyond the Resume report also explains how the decreasing Boomer workforce is leaving job vacancies across the board, which many companies aren’t prepared for. Ladders suggests that in addition to finding people to fill key roles right now, talent executives also have to keep an eye on the medium-term future and hire with succession planning and retention of institutional knowledge in mind.
In order to keep the institutional knowledge within your company’s walls, you need to make sure your retention strategies appeal to your workers. According to the report, 94% of jobseekers would take their dream job immediately if it came along, while 67% would make an immediate switch even for a position that wasn’t their ideal one. These findings drive the retention strategy point further home.

Pay, Boredom, and Long Hours Drive Employees Away

If you think your management team is the reason your employees are leaving, think again! It’s not just a “bad boss” that’s driving workers away, as 30% of respondents cite pay as the primary reason why they left a company. Depending on age, position, and experience, long hours and boredom are also key factors as to why employees are leaving their current jobs.

Perks Make Employees Stay … But for How Long?

According to Ladders’ Beyond the Resume report, perks are a great way to attract and retain talent, but depending on the workers’ experience, perks do little to keep them sticking around. According to the report:
“Older employees—who, again, are less likely to be concerned about salary as a motivator—are also typically less concerned about perks such as free food and company outings than their younger counterparts. Just 16.4% of those with under 5 years of experience cite perks as being ‘not important,’ compared to 28.4% of those with 15 or more years of experience.”
So how do you attract and retain talent? Ladders offers these five suggestions:

1. Take time to consider who your candidates are and where they’re at in their career before making an approach.
2. Sell the sense of mission, not just the company or the job title—especially for more experienced candidates.
3. For younger candidates, leveraging compensation and title may be effective in grabbing initial attention, but the sense of mission will be important to keep them engaged through the recruitment process.
4. While perks and benefits are viewed as nice to have by a majority of candidates, they’re not a high enough priority for most candidates to be valuable as part of the recruitment outreach messaging.
5. Keep in mind that while candidates may have things in common with one another, their needs will be very different based on the individual. As such, researching candidates at the individual level, rather than making assumptions based on function or age, is the real key to making authentic connections and better hiring decisions.

For more information, or to view the full report, click here.