November 2004

Survey shows that competitive pay is necessary

Have you checked to see if your employees' salaries are competitive within your community? According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), having a competitive salary can result in retaining your staff. The association's recent 2004 U.S. Job Recovery and Retention Survey shows that 75 percent of all employees are looking for new employment opportunities and 43 percent of job seekers are looking because they want more money.

The top three reasons employees say they are looking to leave their current positions, according to the survey, are:

• Better compensation elsewhere, 43 percent;
• Better career opportunities, 32 percent;
• Dissatisfaction with opportunities at current job, 22 percent.

"During a poor economy, employees tend to stay put," says Tony Lee, editor-in-chief, CareerJournal.com, SHRM's survey partner. "As the economy improves, interest in jumping ship rises dramatically among employees who are ready to earn more money and find enhanced opportunities for advancement."

In the survey, employees were asked about their job-search activity. The survey found that 35 percent of employees said they are actively job searching, and 40 percent are passively searching. Nearly half of the employed respondents said they would step up their job-seeking efforts as the job market improves. Human-resources professionals believe that as employees leave their organization for new opportunities, most of the resignations will come from non-management (69 percent) and middle-management (19 percent) positions.

SHRM and CareerJournal.com conducted the survey to determine opinions about job recovery and the effectiveness of retention strategies from the perspective of both HR professionals and employees. The survey questions were e-mailed to randomly selected SHRM members, yielding 389 responses from HR professionals, and randomly selected employees in the U.S., bearing 506 responses.

Source: Society for Human Resource Management, www.shrm.org

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