My company, milewalk, is fully committed to bringing valuable insight to the workforce. Irrespective of your vocation, we believe all companies and individuals can support the growth of our economy. We help achieve this by elevating awareness of key employment information to help companies manage their employees more effectively as well as enable individuals to make smart career choices.
Last week, we wrapped our 2016 annual employment survey. This post is an executive review of the findings. Feel free to skip it and download an easily-digestible report chock-full of pretty-colored graphs that will raise your eyebrows and, on occasion, make you cry. Just click the picture!
880 people responded to the survey. The respondent base included individuals who hold positions within various corporate and non-corporate environments.
This employee base is showing some movement at the senior levels. 18.6% of hiring officials had been with their companies less than three years in 2015. In 2016, however, that number has risen to 55.1%. While some of this adjustment can be attributed to elevated responsibilities for employees, the majority is likely caused by senior-level turnover.
Happiness levels have remained somewhat consistent with 2015. 49% of employees are happy or very happy with both their positions and companies versus 29% being unhappy or very unhappy (the rest remaining neutral). The hiring officials were much happier with a whopping 76% being happy and very happy versus a mere 10% being unhappy or very happy.
Regarding compensation, we have a split decision. 49.1% of employees feel they are adequately compensated and 49.1% feel underpaid. Qualitatively, we would offer, based on a broader statistical look, most organizations are fairly compensating their employees relative to “market pay” for their respective positions.
When it comes to job changing, employees’ attitudes and actions toward leaving their current employer continues to be fickle. Over 91% of employees are open to changing jobs and 40.6% of them actually took action to do so in the past year!
As we reviewed the employee’s attitude toward keys areas of their current positions and companies, career development opportunities once again nudged the management team as the most disappointing. Even so, when we evaluated which criteria would lead the charge as they turned to new opportunities, (once again) compensation, role, and culture reigned as the top three.
One other trend we’re noticing as we recruit for our clients is that employees apparently care more about what they do than for whom they do it. While we try to teach our job candidates that “you join a company, you don’t join a job,” the data would seem to support that they are far more concerned about their compensation and specific position than many of the other critical factors.
As employees evaluate the market, there was no surprise that an overwhelming majority (94.9%) would tap their personal network. Traditional job sites, once thought to be on their way to the grave, are holding very steady with two out of three people leveraging them.
As we turned to the hiring officials and reviewed their assessment of upcoming needs, important criteria for the candidates, proficiency level of their recruiting functions, as well as additional avenues they deploy to fulfill their employment needs, there was a mixed review of hiring. Even so, there is an uptick in hiring with almost 90% of respondents indicating they are hiring and 16% citing the need for more than five resources (within their hiring purview).
With the hiring needs in place, these officials cited “time to fill” as the greatest disappointment (for the sixth year in a row). Candidly, we believe that “time to fill” is not the actual issue, but a symptom of a lack of quality candidates (the second most disappointing criteria). Employers simply move more quickly when they have a quality candidate in their recruiting pipeline. Over the last ten years, our historical milewalk statistics indicate a 38.2% greater level of efficiency in these cases.
We reviewed the people and service-related avenues that organizations deploy to satisfy their hiring needs. While almost 72.4% deploy a corporate recruiting function, it’s worth noting this figure is down from 2015. Furthermore, companies have significantly raised the use of RPO’s.
As companies interview potential employees, they will favor capabilities and skills over cultural fit, something we would advise against if you’re seeking a long-term employee retention.
If you didn’t click the picture above, this link works too!
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