It’s a saying we have all heard time and time again, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. And yes, in staffing terms it is true; it is near impossible to find, hire and keep quality talent across most industries if you aren’t offering competitive remuneration packages. So as a small business owner, how you can you possibly compete with the big players in your market who have much deeper pockets and contingency budgets than you can hope for? For starters, figure out what is important to your applicants. You can do this by asking them targeted questions throughout the interview process, such as asking them to rate the importance of the following factors to them on a scale of 1-10:
- Work / life balance
- Flexible hours
- Discounts on company products
- Salary sacrifice / flexibility options
- Proximity of the workplace to their home
- Bonus and incentive schemes
- A social workplace
- Autonomy and variety in their role
- Control over the structure of their day
Another idea is to ask them to rank the things that are important in their next role in priority order including the following:
- Base salary
- Flexibility of hours
- Duties of the role
- Team environment
- Ability to earn commissions / bonuses
Once you have established what is important to your applicants, you will know where your negotiating room lies when it comes to salaries. If your applicant indicates that salary is their top priority, and you really feel they are the best person for the role, research your data to make sure they are not overpricing themselves for the market. Always ask an applicant what salary they are looking for before discussing your ideal offer with them, and do your research as to whether this is fair and reasonable in the market for similar roles with other organisations. If your applicant identifies that salary is lower on their importance list, but you can offer more in the way of the things that are important to them, you are in a winning position. To this applicant, things such as flexible hours and a great team are more important than the money they earn, and provided the wages are fair and just they will typically be happy. As a smaller business you are often in a much better position to offer these flexible options, which larger companies often find it more difficult to manage and implement because of the flow on effect it has on all other staff in the company. By framing your offer in terms of the things that are most important to that applicant you are addressing the things that they indicated were important to them first, and selling them all the benefits of your offer, before getting to the fact that the salary on offer may be slightly less than they may expect elsewhere. This may look like: We would like to offer you the position. As part of your offer we include:
- The ability to chose the nature of your hours within our core business hours
- The ability to earn commissions of X% on all sales you make over your targets
- The ability to work from home when needed
- An extra week annual leave per year
- A salary of $XX XXXX
Now this is not a sure fire fix, applicants in the current job market are not silly, they know their worth and are not afraid to ask for it. They do however appreciate many of those non tangible aspects of the role and organisation and many of them take these into greater consideration. So, whilst paying peanuts does attract monkeys, you don’t necessarily need to pay in gold bullion to attract the right person for your business.
