But rest assured, benefits still matter. In fact, they might matter more than ever in such a competitive candidate-led recruitment market.

• “83% of HR leaders believe they’ll need to adapt what they offer employees in order to attract the best talent in a post-pandemic world”.
• “60% of candidates say that benefits and perks are a major factor when considering a job offer”.

In the digital age the power of benefits to draw talent, attract people and retain staff is all-powerful. But knowing how to adapt an existing benefits package, or build a new one from scratch, needs to be strategised. 

Work benefits are intimately tied to your working culture, and the power of the “culture fit” within the recruitment and retention cycle cannot be overstated. 

So whether you’re purchasing an off-the-shelf package of work perks from companies such as PerkBox, Reward Gateway or Fond, or building a more bespoke offering from scratch, your benefits offer has to be context-led, personal, relevant to your audience, sustainable, and deliverable. 

Tech and Benefit Visibility.

It’s worth diving a little deeper into tech, especially considering the importance of curated digital platforms to recruitment and the overall candidate and employee experience (CX/EX).

From discussions with partners, and in our position as a tech company straddling the entire recruitment space, we’ve seen how impactful good – and bad – tech implementations can be. We’ve heard stories of candidates rejecting companies based on poor ATS UX, or simply not having the tools or visibility on company culture and perks to decide on whether or not to join a new employer.

The delivery of workplace benefits and perks – and the communication and visibility of those perks – will go a long way in engaging new talent, and creating game-changing CX.

Hence the emphasis on choosing the right recruitment CRM or ATS – make sure your chosen platform can integrate and customise to meet CX demand and provide the best experience in your field!

Benefits trends.

Your benefits package also has to be trend-led. The current recruitment and talent acquisition landscape is vicious, but only for those who don’t listen to their people – modern recruitment cultures such as a company’s commitment to ESG, sustainability, and diversity are not only considered good business ethics but absolutely essential to talent acquisition and long term recruitment strategy. 

In this regard, benefits need to be tangible – they need to be visible and meaningful, impactful to both employee and community, and sustainable. As mentioned above, they also need to be accessible, and delivered through both innovative tech platforms which are tied into performance management and in-person experiences and rewards. 

So how should employers market their new, future proof work perk packages? 

• Consider industry best practice: do your research and understand how your audience has changed.
• Consider budget: budget consistently.
• Consider incentives and needs: open your arms to the changing demands of candidates. 

Do your research and understand how your audience has changed.

Our view is simple – some perks are desirable no matter the industry, but you still have to know your audience before you build a perk strategy that will turn heads.  

The great resignation, and the lasting effects of millions of people exiting industries, should be your guide when building a sector-specific benefits package. We’re not saying exclusively base benefits around battling pandemic-era problems, but use them as baseline coordinates.

As we mentioned in the introduction, benefits are more than a series of work-related perks, discounts, or lifestyle additions – they represent a holistic, cultural standpoint, like a lighthouse in the career dark. They embody your working culture, what you stand for, and what your employee’s labour means.

So make sure you seek as much feedback on your employees and prospective employees as possible and build a benefits package that gives them what they now want in the post-pandemic era.

Budget consistently.

There are fairly industry-standard budgetary structures you could deploy to build a benefits package, such as Zero-based budgeting (prioritising employee benefits based on employee wants), incremental budgeting (analysing the previous spend and adjusting YoY), and factoring in certain budgeting ethoses such as cost-neutral benefits.

There are also mandatory “benefits” that you are legally entitled to factor into contracts, such as pension contributions and minimum leave/holiday. This in effect creates tiers of benefit spending, and depending on the size of your company and specific employee demands, can have a huge impact on your budgeting. 

Caboodle advises building a benefit structure around the following elements:

• Number of employees (and how this is projected to grow or decrease)
• Projected employee benefits uptake
• Projected changes in retention due to employee benefits
• Any future legislation changes which may affect the cost
• Any bespoke requirements you might have

And around the following types of benefits:

• Health and wellbeing benefits
• Financial wellbeing benefits
• Lifestyle benefits and employee discounts
• Salary sacrifice benefits
• Commuting and travel benefits

Open your arms to the changing demands of candidates. 

Once you’ve made a list of sector-specific perks, fold them into a complete benefits package that includes country-wide benefits demands. 

For example:

• “67% of employees said that paid sick leave matters most to them. Next on the list were flexible working hours at 57%, and pension contribution matching at 46%” – source
• “(A) Perkbox survey also looked at which perks would make employees feel happier in their jobs, with employee discounts again coming out on top (52%)” – source.
• “According to the Harvard Business Review, private health insurance is high on the list. 88% of people surveyed said that this would be a factor when considering a job offer” – source

What are the key takeaways here? Welfare, future-proofing and money management are key drivers of attractive employment opportunities. 

Summary

You will never, ever, lose face if you change benefits packages to meet the needs of your people. 

Creating a benefits package that meets the demands of the modern workforce is a show of commitment to looking after your people, your community and your environment – and there is no greater magnet for talent than that.

A quick, responsive process is what you need to attract and engage the best talent.

At Rectec we help organisations to find the best Applicant Tracking System or best Recruitment CRM to suit your needs, accompanied by our unique complementary technology marketplace, to help you build the perfect recruitment tech stack for your business.

You can click here to register for Rectec Compare – and best of all, it’s completely free of charge.

The post Job Benefits, and the changing nature of the work perk. appeared first on Rectec.

“Upskilling” is now understood to be a bulwark against future business and professional decline. It’s firmly established that workers across almost every industry (but especially in a few select sectors) want to unlearn and relearn new, essential skills that will help them continue to earn a good keep and stay in work. 

Upskilling and Reskilling have become an acutely personal and business necessity in the wake of the pandemic. Upskilling has, in this context, become a byword for ensuring job security. 

• “The pandemic has been an accelerant—speeding up digitization, e-commerce and automation. And as a result, even more people are now exposed to job displacement than before”.
• “Between 400 million and 800 million workers around the world could be displaced by automation by 2030”.
• “A report by the Learning & Work Institute shows that according to 92% of businesses, digital skills are key”.
• “Employers expect that by 2025…85 million jobs may be displaced by a shift in the division of labour between humans and machines, while 97 million new roles may emerge that are more adapted to the new division of labour between humans, machines and algorithms”.

In short, upskilling is mostly desired because the winds of business change are blowing. While much of the focus has been on the worry of employee obsolescence as the driving factor behind the push for new digital skills, there is huge scope for employment opportunities and career growth in new industries and jobs.

However, a word of warning for recruiters who want to use professional L&D as your reskilling USP – a target word for consideration in one of the above quotes is “could be displaced”.

There is no uniform automotive or digital wave of change that will hit each industry at the same time. For some, it’s already occurring. For others, change will be negligible or slow-moving.

Here is where we want to draw a pretty firm line in the ground: “upskilling” as a term, even as an entire HR sub-industry, is an incredibly large arena of business investment. Therefore, the development of your staff cannot be haphazard – it needs to be targeted, affordable, meaningful, and market-relevant.

Above all else, you need to have complete and total employee buy-in: there is no point in accelerating L&D programs if the outcomes don’t help your people. 

This, in essence, makes upskilling less of a hard skills development plan, and more of a holistic, cultural awakening.

This is where employers have a unique opportunity. Employers can reframe the meaning and vitality of reskilling in personal, employer-specific ways, and attach reskilling initiatives to business, personal, and societal improvements that mean something to your industry and to your people. 

This not only helps your skillset within work but improves your EVP and employer brand and helps give your team a sense of continual value in their development.

So where do we start?

We think it best to focus on the two main pillars of upskilling – what hard skills and what soft skills will most employees absolutely need in the future?

Hard Skills – Digital Skills

This is close to our heart – as Rectec is a digital tool, created expressly to make recruitment CRM and ATS comparisons rapidly available, hyper-relevant and completely digital, we intimately understand the usefulness and power of digital skills and the power of well-curated recruitment tech platforms.

However, our platform can only work with recruiters who understand how ATS efficiencies augment and improve the real job of recruitment – building human relationships and establishing trust between experts in certain fields. 

However, we digress – digital skills are the one “hard skill” employees desire and employers require. 

• “Workers want more digital skills, more inclusivity, and more flexibility…In one of the largest global surveys of workers (workers want to) learn new digital skills and…quickly adapt to remote work. Yet many people think their job is at risk, and half of all respondents feel they’ve missed out on career opportunities or training due to discrimination” – PwC.
• “For UK employers, reskilling would yield positive economic returns in about three-quarters of cases…more than 90 per cent of the UK workforce will need to be trained” – McKinsey.

Soft Skills – Communication

While hard skills may be the superstructure of future-proofing business, Soft Skills are the underlay, the insulation, the facade and the foundations of making sure those hard skills can be deployed and sustainably used. 

According to Pertemps, the most in-demand soft skills for our future of work are:

• Complex problem-solving
• Critical thinking
• Creativity
• People management
• Coordinating with others
• Emotional intelligence
• Judgement and decision-making
• Service orientation
• Negotiation
• Cognitive flexibility

In short, empathetic, open communication and flexibility of working approach seem to be the height of soft skill requirements. 

Hard and Soft skills complement each other. Considering the iterative, multidisciplinary approach of creating digital tools, communication, problem-solving, and coordination of teamwork are just as important as raw coding skills. 

Summary

Upskilling is urgently necessary, professionally demanded and essential for business security. But upskilling raw hard skills alone won’t guarantee an effective workforce or future proof business. 

There have to be commitments to understanding the essential role soft skills play in your business model. Employers need to understand the importance of confidence-building as workers face the existential threat of obsolescence. 

Employers have a window of opportunity to help their people through hard skills upgrade strategies, whilst simultaneously focusing on the long term holistic improvements soft skills development offers both worker and employer.

A quick, responsive process is what you need to attract and engage the best talent.

At Rectec we help organisations to find the best Applicant Tracking System or best Recruitment CRM to suit your needs, accompanied by our unique complementary technology marketplace, to help you build the perfect recruitment tech stack for your business.

You can click here to register for Rectec Compare – and best of all, it’s completely free of charge.

The post How to start upskilling your workforce, and why it’s so important. appeared first on Rectec.