Executive Summary and Contents
When there is little difference in pay rates across specific roles and from one business to another, compensation becomes less effective as a recruitment tool and is best used to keep your current workers in their job.
Despite falling by 4.5% from Q4 2023, the UK’s job vacancy rate is still more than 900,000 and a chronic talent shortage continues to affect almost every business sector and almost every type of role. It’s a crisis felt most acutely in business administration and support occupations, and for entry-level, and low and middle-management roles where up to 43% of surveyed UK businesses are seeking candidates.
Administration and business support, contact centre, HR, marketing & sales and financial workers populate every industry, providing essential services and skills to keep all types of businesses operating at capacity.
However, despite their universal roles, these workers are also part of the national recruitment problem – as they are either in short supply, prone to switching jobs as revealed by high churn rates, or frequently demotivated and unhappy with their jobs – making worker attraction and retention more difficult for employers.
Entry to mid-level candidates are in high demand.
Source: Manpower Q2 2024
As would be expected, businesses are fighting back with near-permanent recruitment programmes – 41% of surveyed UK businesses were hoping to hire in Q2 2024. However, more of the UK workforce is becoming economically inactive (9,400,000, up 275,000 April 2023 to 2024) and a rising unemployment rate may reflect the reluctance of some workers to take on jobs that pay too little or do not meet their personal criteria. Either way, the current intensity of recruitment efforts appears to be simply maintaining the staffing status quo and doing little to improve the situation. Also, the well-worn practice of raising prices, (or in this case, worker compensation rates), the usual answer to any shortage, appears to be no longer working. For many roles, budget constraints prevent businesses from offering pay that is significantly above the norm, and the biggest reason workers leave their job is not money anyway, it’s job satisfaction.
So where does this leave UK businesses? Worker retention is currently more important than recruitment, as keeping the workers they already have is the best way for employers to maintain business operations. Although ensuring good job satisfaction is central to this solution, pay can also play an important role.
To this end, the 2024 Brook Street business professionals salary guide provides accurate and timely market intelligence. Businesses should use this information as a basis for future pay reviews – rewarding their top performers for a job well done and maintaining crucial financial demarcation lines between roles that can incentivise employees to strive harder, seek promotion and stay with their current employer to maximise earning potential.
Source: HR Grapevine 2024
Executive Summary
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79% of UK businesses are struggling to hire the workers they need
Market intelligence is crucial to providing compensation that attracts best talent.
Business admin and support salary data from across the UK
Working with an experiencedadvisor is key
