According to recent data from CV-Library, average salaries across the UK have reached a five-year high. In fact, they’ve climbed to a record £36,493 in the first half of this year, with certain cities seeing even higher increases.
While this is positive news for professionals (naturally, who wouldn’t want to earn more money?!), it’s important that we refrain from taking the figures at face value. Indeed, we know that many recruiters are struggling to source top talent right now and this is forcing businesses to push up pay in a bid to entice people out of their roles.
This is backed up by further data, which shows that the biggest pay jumps occurred in the agriculture (23.3%), recruitment (18.3%), legal (13.7%) and hospitality (13%) industries. At the same time, applications dropped by 7.5% in the first half of the year, with the agriculture, customer service and hospitality sectors seeing the biggest decline.
So what does this all mean for our industry? And how can recruiters storm forward with their hiring efforts despite ongoing uncertainty? We explore this in more detail, below.
Proactivity vs reactivity
According to our findings, there were 30.3% more jobs being advertised during this period then last year. It paints a mixed picture; employers are making less hires, but advertising more jobs. Indeed, many are still relying on candidates to make applications to their roles. But it’s unclear whether this is an approach that can continue.
After all, it’s more important than ever to be proactive in your hiring efforts. When people stop applying for jobs, it suggests that they’re nervous about switching up their careers. We know that many Brits are afraid to move jobs right now; so, there’s more pressure on recruiters to reach out and sell the benefits of their roles.
That’s not to say you should stop advertising your roles. After all, you need to have something to drive candidates towards and showcase your vacancy. However, the best approach is to include a mixture of proactivity and reactivity. Look at search packages and use social media to target the right individuals.
Using the right tools
To help employers push forward with their hiring efforts, many industry suppliers (like ourselves) are exploring ways to innovate and make the user experience as seamless as possible. For example, we’re focussing on improving to our site to ensure better job and CV matches, We’re also integrating with leading Applicant Tracking Systems to help clients with candidate management.
But what are your suppliers doing? And what tools are you using? As a recruiter, it’s crucial to review your suppliers and ensure they understand your hiring goals. What’s more, be sure to check in with them to see if there are any new features that will help with your recruiting efforts. Naturally, they should communicate this with you, but showing interest will speak them to keep you up to date.
After all, if more budget is assigned to increasing salaries, ensuring that the tools you’re using are efficient, cost-effective and helping you to stand out is more important than ever.
Focus on your goals
Ultimately, your end goal is always going to be placing the right person, in the right role. However, it’s also important to set metrics and objectives for your recruitment process. Without these, you’ll never be able to measure how successful it is; or discover where you could potentially be going wrong. In the current market, some of your goals may include:
- Reducing time to hire: Sure, it’s harder to source talent, but don’t let this eat into your hiring cycle. Consider areas you could make more efficient, for example, removing application forms or cutting out interview stages
- Reducing cost per hire: Spending more money on salaries could prompt you to review how much it costs you to recruit someone. This isn’t always easy to work out, but it’s worth being aware of and can help to demonstrate ROI
- Improving quality of hire: Focus on the roles that are going to make a real difference to your company/the one you’re hiring for. Quality wins over quantity in the majority of cases and it can dramatically improve your hiring efforts
In summary
Organisations have had no choice but to push up pay in a bid to entice professionals out of their current roles. Unfortunately, it appears that these efforts aren’t paying off and if the government does not focus on boosting the UK economy, we may well see a high number of UK companies reach breaking point in the next six months.
Our message to our Minister of the UK is to focus on boosting our economy and provide clarity on our country’s future relationship with the EU; otherwise Britain’s jobs boom may reach a sharp downturn – which recruiters will bear the brunt of.
