Sometimes there is. Sometimes the problem is simply the salary.

This doesn’t mean automatically increasing every vacancy by several thousand pounds. It means understanding what comparable employers are paying and being realistic about the experience you can expect to attract within your budget. If you’re offering £26,000 for a role that candidates can readily find elsewhere at £30,000, even the best-written job advert is going to struggle.

There’s another issue too. Increasing salaries to attract new employees without considering the people already doing the same job can create a much bigger problem. Discovering that a new colleague has joined on considerably more money is a fairly effective way of making a loyal employee question how much they’re valued.

For that reason, salary benchmarking shouldn’t only happen when you’re struggling to recruit. Reviewing pay periodically gives you an opportunity to understand where you sit in the market and deal with potential problems before they become resignations or failed recruitment campaigns.

At ASL Recruitment, we’re speaking to candidates and employers across the local market every day. That gives us a useful view of what people are being offered, what candidates expect and where employers are finding recruitment difficult. Sometimes the most useful advice we can give a client is that their salary looks perfectly competitive. On other occasions, it’s explaining that the market has moved on.

Final Thought

You don’t have to be the highest-paying employer in the market, but you do need to know where you stand in it.

Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash