Are reward professionals fighting a losing battle?

Ensuring employees are paid fairly is crucial in recruiting and retaining talent, but can be an uphill challenge.

 

Reward professionals around the UK are tasked with the impossible. While companies far and wide have rediscovered profitability and exchanged exponential growth for cost consciousness, employees are demanding more pay in order to meet rising prices due to inflation.

Gut feeling doesn’t cut it anymore

Let’s take an example. Say you are recruiting for a new role. Your chief finance officer won’t let you offer more than 50K GBP for it.

You have a gut feeling that this salary will not bring you the right candidate, and you are up for a long and challenging recruitment process. 

• But how do you add facts to the feeling? 
• How do you know you are right (or wrong, for that matter)?
• How can you push back and deliver facts that help your organisation save a lot of time and cost during the recruitment process by offering exactly the right pay from the beginning?

Be in the know, always

Let’s take another example and look at attrition. 

Do you know how many of your current employees might be on the verge of leaving the company because you are paying them too little salary? 

What is really needed is real-time data on salary for specific roles with further breakdowns such as regions. 

This would allow you to compare this to your current salaries and from there deduce which of your employees may be getting better offers.

Pay data uses: retain staff

You could analyse live pay for the roles in your organisation to identify disparities to be proactive in terms of retention. 

The best thing you could do is offer top talent a pay raise to make them feel valued and appreciated.

You may have heard the old adage that says ‘you can get a 3% raise, or get a 20% salary increase when looking elsewhere’. The reason for this is that salary levels within companies are often static and by the time you review salaries, someone (hello finance!) has decided that salaries can be increased by a certain percentage.

What is important to remember is that whoever sets the baseline for salary increases is most likely not a talent management professional. In other words, they will not consider the risk of losing staff and its associated costs.

Pay data uses: offer the right pay for the right location 

Salary surveys are great… if you care to look at outdated information.

But in today’s time, the old adage of nothing is as old as the morning newspaper might as well get translated to salaries: nothing is as old as last month’s salary levels. In addition, salary surveys don’t always provide regional, city or town-based data.

When hiring in a specific location, you need accurate data to offer the most relevant pay. 

• If a salary survey includes data from all over the country, you could end up underestimating the pay for a job in a major city.
• On the other hand, you could offer way above the market benefits in rural environments. Great to find talent quickly, but most likely a bad idea, financially speaking.

In partnership with HR DataHub

HR DataHub is your go to tool to make sure all your reward decisions are data backed.

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