Hiring a new employee?
As well as benefits, job adverts and everything else, you must offer the right salary.
Getting it wrong can attract a poorer standard of candidates and lead to a series of ‘no-shows’, which is a real waste of time and resource.
Underpaying a candidate can also result in them leaving the company and impacting productivity rates.
Having a poor staff retention rate not only looks bad on your company, but conducting multiple recruitment campaigns costs a lot of dough as well!
With this in mind, how can you offer the right salary?
What are the best processes and salary checkers to give you a competitive figure which attracts top candidates?
Here’s everything you need to know.
Find the perfect balance
As you can imagine, offering a low compensation package for a position will limit the quantity and quality of applications.
This is why establishing a salary range is a smart choice.
It gives you the flexibility to adapt your offering and it isn’t as ambiguous as the ‘DOE’ (depending on experience) tag.
However, if you do want to offer a salary range instead of an exact amount, you need to make sure the range is perfect for the type of role you’re looking to fill.
This doesn’t give you the right to lowball them when it comes to making an offer.
If you do this, there’s a high probability that your new employee will lose interested and become unmotivated in their role.
On the flip side, if you offer a new employee the higher end of the salary range and it doesn’t fit in with the current pay scales of existing employees, it can cause friction and lead to poor performance.
What’s more, salary discrepancies can make your company vulnerable against charges of discrimination.
Consistency is the key!
Make your salary competitive
Once you’ve considered the balance, it’s time to think about making your salary competitive.
There are a number of salary checkers and calculators that are worth using.
They can help you gauge what the average is depending on your region, the job title and even experience.
Here’s the pick of the bunch:
- Totaljobs salary checker – it’s relatively basic. However, it’s clean, easy to use and doesn’t require you to enter any details.
- Glassdoor salary checker – this one is easy to use as well and even has salaries for related job titles, so you can get a real sense of the industry standard.
- Reed salary checker – as one of the biggest job boards in the UK, Reed has access to a wide range of job salaries. You can browse by sector to make sure your figures align with other similar roles as well.
- Monster salary calculator – another big job board player makes the list. This is actually powered by PayScale, so the results should be more accurate.
Just bear in mind, some of these examples might not have as much data about specific roles or regions.
So, if you want in-depth results, it’s worth investing in PayScale.
For a more proactive approach, do your homework yourself by researching similar job adverts from your competitors.
If you’re re-filling a role following the departure of an employee, don’t just assume that you can offer the same salary.
Times change, with inflation and living costs always on the rise.
Stick to your salary range
After deciding what salary range to offer, avoid bending the rules.
You need to be consistent and adhere to this.
Break each figure down within your range by years of experience, desirable and essential traits.
The candidate needs to have certain qualities, skills and qualifications to earn the top end of the salary range.
This isn’t open to opinion or debate.
However, for a more specialist or senior role, you’ll need to be a bit more flexible on salary as it could take a certain figure to lure them away from their current employer.
These specialists or senior members of staff aren’t usually comparable either, so there shouldn’t be any discriminatory issues from fellow colleagues.
Nevertheless, find your bracket and stick to it.
If you start offering more or drastically lowering it as soon as you hear what they previously earned, you’re going to land your company in a spot of bother ethically and financially.
What if your first salary offer is rejected?
There are times when a candidate may reject your initial salary offer and try to counter.
It’s entirely up to you what you do.
Ask yourself: how much do you want and need this candidate?
Have you got a pool of other professionals who could do an equally as good job?
It’s all about weighing up their value and what they can add to your business.
If you can’t offer anymore, based on your strict brackets of pay equality, you can always make a revised offer with an initial offer and a clear path of progression to move them up to a higher amount after a certain amount of time.
The candidate can then prove their worth and give you time to adjust your budget.
Alternatively, you could always tweak the work benefits package.
Can you give them more holiday or access to extra training courses?
There might be instances where a candidate wants a higher salary to compensate for their commute, so flexible working hours and/or working from home benefits can help seal the deal.
You can find more information about what work benefits employees want in our previous blog.
Final thoughts
The main thing when considering how to offer the right salary is to be consistent and do your homework.
Researching industry and job standards will allow you to create a competitive salary range that attracts top performers.
With a bit of careful planning, competitive research and using top salary calculators, you can turn your company into a highly desirable place to work.
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