Northern employers award record pay to overcome recruitment difficulties
workforce in the last six months and 33% plan to raise pay in the future. Other popular responses to retention difficulties in the past six months include improved flexible working arrangements, implemented by 40% of employers in the North, focusing more on employee wellbeing (49%) and increased investment in training and development (35%).
Significant problems filling vacancies Over half (66%) of employers in the North said that they plan to recruit in the next three months to March 2022 and just one in ten (11%) plan to make redundancies. hiring, pay and redundancy intentions of organisations, and the pay award figure revealed in the latest report is the highest recorded in the last ten years of the CIPD’s reporting. This demonstrates the scale of the growing challenge facing employers in finding and keeping staff. Employers across the North of England are responding to recruitment problems by increasing pay, providing more flexible jobs, and more training and progression opportunities. These findings are from the CIPD’s latest Labour Market Outlook , which found that employers in Northern England anticipate making pay awards of 3% in 2022 as they look to combat increasing recruitment and retention difficulties. The quarterly survey highlights the
However, while recruitment intentions remain strong, half (50%) of employers in the North report having vacancies that are hard-to-fill. Two thirds of organisations (69%) anticipate problems filling vacancies in the next six months, with a third (35%) expecting these problems to be ‘significant’. Incentives to attract new hires In response to recruitment challenges, in the past six months over half (58%) of employers in the North with hard-to-fill vacancies have increased wages to attract new hires and 41% of respondents have advertised more jobs as flexible. Looking to the future, 43% of employers in the North said they will look to upskill existing staff to help address the issue of hard to fill vacancies, while 34% said they will improve job quality and raise wages respectively, to help attract and retain talent. Overcoming retention difficulties There is also a clear focus on workforce retention. Two-fifths of Northern employers (43%) reported increased employee turnover or difficulty with retaining people over the last six months. To address this, over half (61%) of employers with retention difficulties have raised the pay of the incumbent
Jon Boyes, CIPD Labour Market Economist said:
Even though more businesses in the North anticipate making record pay awards to their employees this year, most people are set to see their real wages fall against the backdrop of high inflation. What is encouraging is that more employers in the region are looking
beyond pay increases to help attract and retain staff by providing more flexible working opportunities and investing in more training and development, as well as taking staps to support employee health and wellbeing. Together these practices can broaden the range of candidates employers can attract and may also reduce the need to recruit more staff, which should reduce wage inflation pressure to a degree.
REGIONAL INSIGHTS
Spring 2022
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