How to win talents and affect the hearts of employees when you are no longer able to take part in the salary race? Of course with new magic words like employee experience.
Looking at various salary surveys, we can acknowledge that all employers today, including ourselves, are under the salary pressure. Thus, we have also been asked whether the headhunting is intended to buy over good candidates and how much bigger should be the offered salary, so that the candidate would be willing to change jobs. We have a deep understanding of our customer’s needs and opportunities, and we believe that you do not need a recruitment partner to buy somebody over. We consider salary to be a short-term motivator, and candidates, whose only motivation to change jobs is salary, will not reach our final selection.
Materiality is no longer enough, something more is needed – people have become much more aware, but also more demanding. They want exciting work, inspiration, an opportunity to learn and develope. No less important is a good team and the recognition you get. Employee experience is the buy-over currency of the new era and the one who can create a happy organization, wins.
Employees come first
Richard Branson has said: “Customers don’t come first. Employees come first. When they take care of their employees, they take care of their customers.”
That is why many of our customers have become more aware of the development and management of employee experience. Employee experience is a rising trend around the world. Jacob Morgan, a Forbes journalist and branding specialist, has researched and surveyed the topic in more than 250 organizations.
The study confirmed that employers, who contributed to the well-being of their employees, earned almost four times as much on average. According to Morgan, the supply of meaningful work needs to be given more prominence. You should want to work out of desire, not obligation. In addition to an understanding boss and nice colleagues, people value the work environment they are in on a daily basis. A new coffee machine or sports club membership card is not enough to improve the employee experience. These are short-term motivators. The keys need to be found to engage employees on a long-term basis, to be a constantly evolving, yet disciplined organization that offers substantive challenges.
What is this employee experience after all?
Employee experience is considered to be the sum of all the points of contact that an employee has with the company from recruitment to termination of employment. These experiences are positive or negative experiences, gained during a direct internship while working for a company. If you use a recruitment partner or a headhunting company, the employee experience starts there! It is also worth thinking about this before starting cooperation. Companies have approached the new field through aspects that are important to them, but above all they look at soft values, the work environment and IT solutions.
Soft values, such as culture, mean the values that guide our actions, the way we work together and the goals that unite people. That is why it is important to look behind the words over and over again and discuss their content.
In the case of the work environment, pingpong and snacking machines have been a trend for some time. It is more important to actually analyze how much the work environment supports culture and overall flexibility. Is it possible to work remotely (which we have talked about in more detail here) or, for example, there are open / closed rooms for work, recreation and creative areas, clean and tidy common areas, healthy eating, etc. We should also not forget whether the workload even allows us to take part in the game of pingpong, as so many candidates working for a trendy company have told us.
IT solutions look at the solutions used in the company compared to what is offered to customers. Innovative technologies must be available to all workers. It is important to digitize and automate activities so that employees can create more value and develop themselves.
With employee experience, you retain talents, but the salary race is not slowed down.
Every company wants to create victorious and lasting teams. Creating good synergies and achieving goals is an ongoing work and process. Employee experience enables you to retain employees and makes the company attractive in the labour market, but the lack of specialists, the openness of the labour market and economic growth still give impetus to the salary race. Eesti Pank forecasts salary growth of 7.4% and 6.7% in the following year and in 2023, respectively. Estonia’s GDP per capita in the European Union has reached the average, but we are aiming for an ever higher standard of living and there is still room to rise in the ranking.
Our headhunting process supports companies in finding talent at every level and candidates in advancing their careers. When a candidate is ready to take a step forward in their career, salary increase is natural and organic, but we do not use it as a motivational factor in headhunting. Employee experience is also the most expensive currency for us to attract candidates.
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