Employment in the UK – it’s an applicant’s job market, how should employers respond?

According to Personnel Today, two-thirds of organisations are struggling to find the right candidates for their job roles, causing recruitment budgets across the UK to burst as anxious employers find that they must make their recruitment packages more attractive to candidates.

The factors amplifying this issue include unemployment falling to the lowest rate since the 1970’s, and the ongoing uncertainty surrounding Brexit causing a significant number of employees to become wary of making a move.

These issues are creating a job market where applicants are in control; if an employee does decide to move on, they have a wide range of choices to consider, and recruiters clambering for their attention. For example, even fairly satisfied employees can be enticed away with inflated salaries, fun incentives and generous benefits.

What does this mean for employers?

Whilst a proportion of employee turnover can doubtlessly be beneficial – fresh faces bring fresh ideas after all – employers are feeling the full force of high turnover becoming the new normal.

And, with the true cost of taking on new employees adding up to more than double the average salary, recruitment budgets are increasing to unsustainable levels. Factoring in the time it takes to hire temporary cover, select and interview applicants, and run background checks, on top of the expense of recruitment advertising, means the investment in each and every empty role is getting higher and higher.

Add to this the burden of lost productivity whilst one employee is leaving and another is settling in; (it can take up to 32 weeks to raise a new employee’s productivity to the optimum level); and the financial loss becomes fairly staggering. In fact, some industries report an annual cost of almost £2 million spent on replacing employees who have left for pastures new.

So, what should organisations be doing to attract and retain the best employees?

It’s no secret that the best way to retain your most efficient team members, while also attracting the greatest new talent around, is to focus on employee lifecycle management. However, many organisations are making costly mistakes in their efforts to do so.

This month at Cascade, we’ll be exploring the best ways to attract and retain your employees – including promoting a brand new Insight Guide to help you discover whether your employee lifecycle is working as well as it could.

In the meantime why not take a look at our applicant tracking system and recruitment software to help ease the pain of recruiting for your business.

Keep an eye on our blog and social media for more.