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When It Comes To Recruiting, What Are Your Shiny Things?
Black Kites. A majestic bird of prey who loves to collect shiny things. They believe that the mirrored items cast enough reflection to ward off predators.
Bear with me, I’ve not switched from recruitment to Autumn Watch. So how does this all link to recruitment I hear you ask. Well please allow me to explain and let’s think about what ‘shiny things’ you’re offering in the current recruitment climate.
At the moment, if you are involved in any kind of recruitment, you are probably experiencing a very challenging time. You could be a recruitment agency, in-house recruitment team or even trying to recruit for your own business, without success.
You can’t miss the plethora of articles about the shortage of HGV drivers across the UK, although in all honesty there seems to be a shortage across several industries right now, including hospitality.
· What are you going to do?
· What do you have in place to make sure candidates apply to your job advert and not to one of your competitors?
The pandemic has taught us all a lot of lessons, but one I have found personally is that it’s time for change. Most of us, if asked the question would want a better quality of life, so you have to factor these things in.
What are your ‘shiny things’?
Now more than ever before, you need to stop and think before advertising a vacancy. Spend time doing a bit more research online to see what your competitors are doing, how they are advertising for staff, and what additional ‘shiny things’ are they offering to ensure they get a response to their job advert.
These could include things like:
- Offering a 4-day week
- Reviewing your staff incentives package and adding to it
- Increasing annual leave allowances
- Including some home working, more flexibility
- Introducing an early finish on a Friday
- Offering a more competitive salary package
The final one raises a very interesting point. Many companies I have spoken to about competitive salary packages can’t offer this. Feedback from them is that they can’t because they have lots of staff in the same role on different rates of pay.
I recently did a survey on LinkedIn, asking the question “If you are looking for work right now, what is the most important feature the new role needs to offer you”?
Home working as an option came out top, with 48% of the respondents – something that pre-pandemic may not have even crossed the minds of those looking for a new job. Work/life balance was the second most desirable option, with 22% citing a 4-day working week. The two things that may have topped the poll before Covid (more salary and benefits, and an opportunity to progress) only scored 17% and 13% respectively – a sure sign that times (and priorities) have changed over the last 20 months or so.
You need to act. If you don’t, you will find yourself coming last in the race. Be the difference. Be the one that thinks outside the box to find candidates.
If you don’t, you run the risk of goods being sat in the warehouse with nobody to drive the trucks.
There are a lot of Black Kites out there looking for new employment opportunities. If you don’t polish your ‘shiny things’ you’ll never attract them!
At Recruit123, we have a wealth of HR professionals all within easy reach. If salary pay is one of your concerns, talk to an expert about bringing everyone into line. Drop us a line and we will connect you.
If you need help with advertising a role - we can help there too. Our job adverts use a mix of job boards and social media to help attract candidates. We can also carry out research for you and will feed back to you any of our findings before you decide to use our service.
