Competitive Compensation: What to Do When Comp Falls Short

Scenario: Your opening’s compensation package is not attracting the candidates you need.


You and your search firm are excited to begin the search for a critically important member of your team. You believe that in the current economic environment, there must be a lot of recently downsized candidates that you can snap up.  Yet, it turns out the candidates that you want expect more in compensation than what your company is prepared to offer.  Still, whenever you try to broach the salary shortfall with those that control your corporate purse strings, they continue to insist the compensation is competitive – as if wishing could make it so.  As a result, the hiring manager is growing increasingly dissatisfied.  He suspects that you and your search firm are not trying hard enough, when that could not be further from the truth.

The problem may be fairly commonplace, but your search firm could have taken simple steps to prevent it. At the start of every search engagement, a search firm must:

• Proactively be on the lookout for threats to the success of a search.  For instance, the firm should make certain the salary, title, and scope are competitive in comparison to similar roles elsewhere.

• Gather market intelligence to document the threat, conduct analysis of the data, and recommend solutions to resolve the threat.
  

• Prepare a report for the hiring manager that can be used to make a business case for necessary changes in salary, title, or scope.
  

• In the event the company chooses not to address the threat, the document demonstrates that your team kept everyone fully informed.
  

Search firms often waste months for candidates that simply do not exist. As they do, the firms may whine about issues with compensation, title, scope, or shortages of talent when they should be much more proactive. They should bullet-proof every engagement by providing critical market intelligence to their clients – empowering them to address threats before they cause a search to fail.

(For more tips, whitepapers, and articles, visit www.thegoodsearchllc.com)