The tight talent market is creating a huge challenge for employers. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to recruit the talent they want and hold onto the talent they need to succeed. In fact, 80% of employers find recruitment and retention to be the top objective for creating a benefits strategy.
Let’s look at 7, perhaps surprising, facts that support why recruitment and retention should be top-of-mind.
Recruitment Woes
- Almost three-quarters of employers are struggling to find relevant candidates for open positions. The competition for talent is fierce, so employers will likely be vying for the same candidates.
- 86% of qualified candidates are already employed. This may mean that you have to look to your competition to find the talent you want. This also means that your competitors could be trying to poach your talent, too.
- 86% of recruiters and 62% of employers feel the labor market is candidate-driven, meaning job-seekers have the power and employers are in need of attractive tools to win over prospective talent.
Retention Stats
- Approximately 3 million Americans quit their job each month. That’s not including layoffs and other involuntary termination.
- Over a quarter of employees are in a high-risk retention category, many of whom make up a company’s critical employees and top performers who won’t be easy to replace.
- It can cost over 200% of salary to replace a highly-trained employee. This is on top of other, more hidden costs like lost knowledge and productivity.
- More than 50 percent of American employees believe that if they lost their current job, they would be able to replace it in the next six months. In the past, when the job market was more volatile due the economy, employees were less assured that they could find a new job which made them more likely to stay with their current company. With today’s economy, employees have renewed confidence that they can find new opportunities. This makes them more likely to leave.
The Challenge
What all of these statistic point to is the need to create a highly honed strategy for recruitment and retention. As you may know, benefits are an employee’s top consideration before joining or leaving a company, with healthcare benefits being #1. And so, improving healthcare benefits would be the most logical solution.
However, in an age where the top HR concern is controlling benefit costs and the status quo is cost-shifting strategies that result in more out-of-pocket costs for the employee, improving healthcare benefits seems like a daunting task.
Better Health Benefit Options
While adding voluntary benefits may appear to give the employees more health benefit choices, these kinds of supplemental plans are typically employee-paid, so they don’t provide an additional benefit that proves an employer’s investment into the employee. Critical talent you’re trying to recruit and retain won’t be persuaded with a pseudo-benefit.
There is another type of supplemental health insurance that is employer-paid that can be offered to select employee classes, even just those hard to recruit or hard to retain positions. It’s called expense reimbursed insurance, and it can offer real insurance protection from $5,000 to $100,000 in annual coverage. This is an innovative benefit that employees will value and won’t find at competitor companies, whereas compensation and a bonus can always be matched.
Turn the recruitment and retention challenge into an opportunity to boost your benefit strategy and secure or win the key people you really depend on.