Where has all the talent gone?
In our quest to find some talent to join our Payroll team we have run into one or two difficulties. To put it mildly. It seems that talent at the top tier in payroll has retreated – some into well earnt retirement, some into new careers (having been defeated by the mind-boggling furlough rules), and some into a black hole, it seems. Where are they?
It's not just talented payroll folks that are thin on the ground. We have also been searching for clever people – with a bit of get up and go – to fill roles in our Employee Benefits team. It’s quite a niche area, but not one that’s difficult to transfer into if you have the drive and the commitment to do so. But I’m wondering if many people actually have drive and commitment anymore. I sense a cultural malaise in the employment market, which is now so much less about long-term career development and more about high level employee churn as individuals jump from ship to ship, like pirates disinterested in the destination and purely attracted to the booty.
It's even harder at ‘entry level’. We’ve been looking for administrators who have an ambition to go on a learning journey with us and build a career. This has been front and central to our recruitment process, and we’ve asked applicants to put the strength of their ambition into words. To the question “what attracts you to this opportunity?” I could honestly weep (not in a good way) at some of the responses. One, among many, and misreading our question, I think, stood out as an indicator of what people really think about employers. “A company that is loyal to its employees is rare to find these days” he wrote, apropos I don’t know what. In any case, I don’t agree with his assertion. Bad employers make the headlines but they are the exception, not the norm. What does seem to be the norm, increasingly, is that good employers are struggling to attract and retain people who will truly deliver a return on the investment that is made in them.
We know there is a labour shortage right now. This has given employees some leverage to bargain for higher salaries – and I appreciate why higher salaries are needed in these economically straightened times. However, artificially inflating pay scales in order to attract people into your business (or to stay in your business) is a short-term fix that will inevitably have repercussions sooner or later. The P&L will feel the pinch and either sales must go up, or other jobs must be lost. Nobody wants to think about this right now, or to imagine that employers will increasingly look to outsource functions, to invest in tech, and/or to use overseas contractors as alternative ways of getting the job done.
Our own strategy for plugging the talent gap is threefold. Firstly, we won’t dangle unrealistically fat carrots in front of anyone’s nose to make them join or to make them stay. We certainly pay well (upper quartile), with exceptional benefits and flexibility, but ultimately it is intrinsic motivation that will deliver high performance and success in our business.
Secondly, we are ‘growing our own’ talent by giving employees every opportunity to get stuck into interesting and different projects and client work. We mentor them so that they can deliver to our standards and at the same time we encourage them to unearth their unique professional identities.
And thirdly, we won’t compromise on the quality of people we bring into the mix. We’ve taken some knocks, made some hiring mistakes in the past, and we now find ourselves scouring a bleak horizon for resource. But we just can’t settle for ‘good enough’ when we’re on a mission for great. The hunt for talent continues.