Sunday 22 April 2012

UK employers struggling to attract and retain quality staff

A recent survey carried out by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) and Xpert HR reveals that between September 2010 and September 2011 the number of managers resigning from their job has more than doubled, passing from 3.9% to 9.4%.

Despite the labour market is not really at its best, employers are currently experiencing serious difficulties both in attracting and retaining quality staff. More in particular, from the recruitment point of view, employers are finding it difficult to recruit individuals with the desired skills and capabilities. This result is actually made even harder to achieve because of their inability to offer individuals attractive salary packages.

Things are not going any better from the retention point of view. The rate of employers reporting talent retention difficulties has, in fact, increased from 31.7% to 55%, despite managers have received an average 3.1% salary increase, i.e. a 13% growth vis-à-vis the previous year.

The CMI said that 1 in 10 managers have possibly resigned just because they have received better offers (which, considering the relevance of the phenomenon, should slightly be in contrast with the current employers inability to offer better reward packages, unless a real war for talent is underway), but it is also very likely that many of them have just simply left the profession. Nonetheless, this trend is rather worrying considering that the UK Government is estimating a need for 544,000 additional managers by 2020.

Once again, the best solution could be represented by affective and well designed total reward packages. Though understanding employers’ difficulties to offer individuals better reward packages, in fact, the CMI urge employers having recourse to non-financial reward approaches in order to retain quality staff. As suggested by Kristopher Kinsella, acting Chief Executive of CMI, in fact: “A company that does not work hard to retain its employees and invest in its people will find itself in a difficult situation given we already have a shortage of high quality managers. Strong managers are the lifeblood of effective organisations and too many employers are realising this too late.”