There is no business plan in any applicant tracking system, no profit in a job posting, no future in federal employment metrics, no solution in HR departments, and no answers in databases or algorithms.
Meh, not really the problem. Every company realizes there is a buyers market (sans Technical) for every position, and can interview 20+ people for a help desk role.
No training is available because, what is the ROI? I know several companies (this is SLC) who don't train even for automated testing. After the testing, the employees find a better job.
Symptom or syndrome? Symptom is employee skills > company re: new job, vs higher position in company (or, in better English, training leads to employees finding better companies, vs staying with a current company and building that company.)
There is no loyalty amongst most companies for training or career development, as the ROI is not there (under utilization, a fallacy of implementation).
Should your company be based on ROI metrics per-project, and per-resource? Do you call your employees resources?
Utah (which has a large influx of Silicon companies trying to find cheap labor (typically they do) at lower cost of living thus for salary (typically they do) can look at 20+ candidates with marginal requirements met (experience/projects), but, it is a buyers market. Its not panacea like Silicon Valley, and SLC is rated very high for business, tangentially, you should be able to find top talent for top dollar.
Talent shortage, there is not, but training / development there is, and no company wants to take that on, because companies realize loyalty exists at a quarter-quarter statement (worse with a PE firm), so how do employee's progress? Change jobs every 2-3 years for a 10k+ raise.
I realize I am ranting, but skill matching to a position is broken, and no automated ATS system will fix a resume/pubic facing publication.
/end: The "problem" at a symptom level is companies holding out for "best of best" when they probably do not need such candidates, and could train for such. Given, a SharePoint admin at $20 / hr (case study), they found it, after I placed them, and they left after six months when they realized their skill set warranted a $20k raise.
Companies can under pay undergrads and mid-level candidates (who are not ivy/target/"rock star guru beer whatever") and do so, only to find a high turn-over rate.
Fix turn-over rate? Or just keep filing the desperate mid-esque level folks who just need work and would fulfill Senior level demands of work fulfillment?
I've never gotten a raise worth mentioning at a company, but I've twice gotten > $15k cash raises switching companies. Now why the hell would I stay at a company in lieu of $15k cash; if it's stock options, they'd better be taking off like a rocket ship.
One former employer, with (guessing) a median employee duration of 15 months, would complain endlessly about how hard it was to hire. It was frustrating to see really good employees already trained on a very complicated internal hadoop variant walk out the door; somehow, the dedicated team of 7-9 recruiters (including managers) costing probably on the order of $1mm/year fully loaded; countless hours of engineering time phone screening and interviewing; and the opportunity cost never made management pay people what they could get elsewhere.
You could consider just taking that 1mm and distribute it among your employees to make their salary competitive to reduce the turnover after training on that complicated internal hadoop variant.
There is an easy solution and I don't know why so many companies can't understand this. It's simple, pay a fair amount and there will be lower turn over. Every employee should be evaluated every two years so that their salary is at least the market median. And a raise doesn't even have to match what an employee would get from switching jobs. For example, if an employee could get 10k raise by changing jobs, many would stay if given a raise half of that. The reason is, switching jobs is risky. Next job could have a bad boss, bad coworkers, etc. If offered, it would often make sense to stay at a good job and take the 5k instead of going for the 10k with unknown risks.
But instead they just give no raises, or even insult their high performers with a "generous" 3% and cause resentment and lower morale.
Every single survey done on employee satisfaction shows salary coming much further down the scale than other factors, like engaging work, good management, leadership, a feeling of contribution, training and growth, etc.
The best, easiest, most profitable way of reducing turnover is to improve their management and leadership. Once you've reduced turnover the benefits of good training far exceed the costs and you get less turnover and more productive staff as a result. Then you can give them a raise so they appreciate the benefits of being more productive.
I think that depends on if the salary is fair. If it's not fair (below market) then it becomes the overwhelming factor. Above fair, it quickly has diminishing returns and other factors are stronger. Part of good management is recognizing this.
They are far, far from basic requirements for a job. They may be for engineers and highly skilled professionals, but for the majority of workers the only basic requirements are reasonable workplace safety and humane hours - and even those are often in question.
You don't get such numbers by asking people 'what would you prefer' - that would give wrong answers even w/o lying, since many of those things are such where sociologists know that the believed preference (what you think you'd choose) differs from the true preference (what you do choose in reality).
But you get useful results if you (a) ask people how happy they are (even if they exaggerate and understate, the ranking is generally accurate), and (b) ask people if they're getting X in the company, and then measure the correlations (and do a bunch of tricky adjustments for factors that are interrelated).
I.e., you don't ask "is a fair boss important for you? are office conditions important for you?" - but, if for example, on average the people who think they have a fair boss are feeling happier than those who think they have an unfair boss; but those who think that the office conditions really suck are just as [un]happy that those who feel that the office is okay - now, that's useful signal.
I think they might respond assuming that "higher salary" means +15%, which is what you can realistically expect in low-paid jobs, and which, for most people, is not worth dealing with an asshole boss, bad work environment etc.
In tech, on the other hand, it can be $70k for a fullfilling job vs $200k for a boring grind in say finance...
If every employee's salary is at least the market median, the market median will rise until half of the employees have salaries below the median. By definition. You can't have Lake Wobegone in a market.
This is true, but if the market is moving and you are still...its moving further away from you. There has to be a balance there. As an employer, you are trying to reap profit from investing early in the cycle (cheap wages). As an employee, you need to induce re-pricing (either promotion, job offer, or switch-eroo).
Except wages are high right now for technical workers due to the low supply of them, as the market gets flooded with technical workers in the coming years wages in this industry will probably drop.
With the exception of the last one, every instance of "their" in your post should have been "there." I say this not to be a pedant, but because it made your otherwise good post difficult to read.
Meh, not really the problem. Every company realizes there is a buyers market (sans Technical) for every position, and can interview 20+ people for a help desk role.
No training is available because, what is the ROI? I know several companies (this is SLC) who don't train even for automated testing. After the testing, the employees find a better job.
Symptom or syndrome? Symptom is employee skills > company re: new job, vs higher position in company (or, in better English, training leads to employees finding better companies, vs staying with a current company and building that company.)
There is no loyalty amongst most companies for training or career development, as the ROI is not there (under utilization, a fallacy of implementation).
Should your company be based on ROI metrics per-project, and per-resource? Do you call your employees resources?
Utah (which has a large influx of Silicon companies trying to find cheap labor (typically they do) at lower cost of living thus for salary (typically they do) can look at 20+ candidates with marginal requirements met (experience/projects), but, it is a buyers market. Its not panacea like Silicon Valley, and SLC is rated very high for business, tangentially, you should be able to find top talent for top dollar.
Talent shortage, there is not, but training / development there is, and no company wants to take that on, because companies realize loyalty exists at a quarter-quarter statement (worse with a PE firm), so how do employee's progress? Change jobs every 2-3 years for a 10k+ raise.
I realize I am ranting, but skill matching to a position is broken, and no automated ATS system will fix a resume/pubic facing publication.
/end: The "problem" at a symptom level is companies holding out for "best of best" when they probably do not need such candidates, and could train for such. Given, a SharePoint admin at $20 / hr (case study), they found it, after I placed them, and they left after six months when they realized their skill set warranted a $20k raise.
Companies can under pay undergrads and mid-level candidates (who are not ivy/target/"rock star guru beer whatever") and do so, only to find a high turn-over rate.
Fix turn-over rate? Or just keep filing the desperate mid-esque level folks who just need work and would fulfill Senior level demands of work fulfillment?
/ranting