With 2021 behind us, we are now well into 2022 and taking a refreshed look at the current recruitment market.

2022 is set to be another challenging and turbulent year for recruiters, for in-house and external recruiters.

At the time of writing this article (February 3rd) there are over 4,164 live vacancies in Dorset on the Reed job board alone.  3,967 of those are fulltime with the rest being part time.  In total Reed have 296,456 vacancies live on their job boards across the UK!  At Aspire, we use 3 different job boards so total that up and suffice to say, it’s a lot!
 
eBoss reports: “Although the UK jobs market has been dealing with skills gaps for way over a decade, this ‘New Normal’ is different. Staffing droughts are impacting every level of recruitment. It is not so much a skills shortage as a people shortage. The question is whether this has impacted the outcome of the survey.”

Avature reports that a survey of 6,000 employees in the UK showed that 24% or people are planning to change their current work position I the next three to six months. Many wanting a change due to burnout and a lack of sense of belonging at work. This is driving Avature’s belief that company culture will take centre stage in 2022, it’s a belief that we also share at Aspire Jobs.

With this shift in worker perspective, we are consistently seeing Employee benefits and rewards rising the ranks of “must haves” for candidates.

While 91% of HR workers surveyed agree recognition and reward has a positive effect on employee retention, only 22% of managers strongly agree that their company provides them with the tools and understanding on how to recognise colleagues effectively.

Looking at this from a perspective of retention and loyalty, almost half of employees surveyed agreed that they would leave a company that didn’t praise or thank them enough for the work they did. Conversely only 26% of managers strongly agreed that their company praises or thanks employees for the good work they do based on their company’s values, and almost a third agreed that they struggle to find the time to give out thanks and praise. Stat source

I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce Bournemouth based company Cordoba Rewards to you. Cordoba Rewards is a Company that can help ease the stress of rewarding and recognising positive behaviours in employees, offering a one stop package that is user friendly and offers a vast choice of options.
Here’s an outline of what they do and what they can offer…

Their custom rewards portal is built to your specification, they will guide you through using a points-based system to offer employee recognition, reward loyalty to the business and increase retention.

• Employers are offered an all-in-one solution to reward their employees with Points. These points are then redeemed from a large selection of hand selected items in our rewards catalogue. The catalogue is built into a personalised standalone website that is exclusively accessible by our customers and their employees.
• The portal starts at £2,500 for the unique site to be built and then the points are purchased as a pay as you go – the price per point may vary. There are no monthly recurring costs, you only pay when you buy points – this is different to many other rewards suppliers and means that the money spent goes directly to the users and isn’t wasted in any way.
• The benefits of using this system is giving your employees a selection of over 2000 products to choose from, options to save up points for higher value items and really give them control over what they can buy with their reward. 
• This kind of employee rewards leads to better staff retention, higher levels of productivity and promotes loyalty.

Employers must offer more than the going rate for salary.  20 days holiday doesn’t cut it anymore – it’s not a benefit, it’s a legal requirement.  People have a choice and are exercising that choice, as you can see from the fact and figures reported above.  Candidates are choosing companies based on culture, benefits, hours, flexibility, and salary demonstrating that a decent benefits and rewards system is more important now, than ever before.
 
Cordoba Rewards are kindly offering a 10% discount on the final portal fee, just quote Aspire Newsletter when talking to them [email protected]