Warm up
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- What industry do you work in and what is your role?
- What are your responses in your role / position?
- Can you describe to the function of your workplace / company?
- How many departments, how many offices. National or International?
- What are the minimum requirements for employment ie Education or Experience?
- How many opportunities are there to ‘move up the ladder’?
- What is the process for changing job roles ie Interview? Test?
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- Current projects? Deadlines? Opportunities?
- Anything of interest happening?
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1. To help attract people to come work for a tech platform whose customers are restaurant and hospitality companies—both industries hit hard by the pandemic—SevenRooms chief people officer Paul McCarthy knew he had to think outside the box.
2. The company already offered sign-on bonuses for some tough-to-fill jobs and cushy perks like unlimited paid time off, but despite new areas of growth for the company, it had trouble getting candidates who were feeling uncertain about the prospects of its industry during the pandemic, he recalls.
3. So McCarthy decided to try something a little different: Having all new employees take their first two weeks off, providing pay and benefits while setting their official start date 14 days before they begin doing real work. The “Fresh Start” program is, in one sense, a twist on a sign-on bonus—but one that also underscores its commitment to employees’ time.
If you were a potential new employee which of these ‘job perks’ are most attractive to you and why?
4. “I started to think about … what could we do for people coming in?” McCarthy says. “Why don’t we just say that people who are coming in have the opportunity to just take time off from the very beginning—from the first day—to recharge, refresh?” In a tight labor market where candidates hold much more power, companies are increasingly pulling out all the stops, trying new time-off programs, investing more in wages and benefits and adding more or bigger sign-on bonuses for positions from the very top of the organization all the way down to the front lines.
5. “Companies are really trying to get creative,” says Don Lowman, who leads the global total rewards practice at Korn Ferry, which found that nearly 20% of companies it surveyed were using sign-on bonuses more than before the pandemic. Companies, he says, are “going further down in the business than they would have done before, using [signing bonuses] more for front-line employees.”
6. United Airlines is advertising for jobs such as part-time ramp agents or baggage handlers in Denver that offer $10,000 sign-on bonuses, issued in monthly increments that require a year of service. Target said Monday it would be setting a new starting wage range that goes from $15 to $24 and expanding access to benefits, lowering the average minimum hours worked to qualify as well as reducing waiting periods for new employees to join health and 401(k) plans.
Some of the ideas put forward in the article are unsustainable eg unlimited paid leave, how can companies make hard to fill or tough jobs more attractive for potential employees in the long run?
7. Amazon has offered $3,000 signing bonuses to warehouse workers—and in February, more than doubled its maximum base pay to $350,000 for corporate and tech employees, citing “the need to remain competitive for attracting and retaining top talent,” according to Bloomberg.In top executive jobs, particularly for hard-to-fill finance, human resources and technology roles, companies are dangling increasingly lucrative amounts to draw top talent.
8. Larry Emond, a senior partner with Modern Executive Search, says that in a recent meeting, a chief human resources officer at a mid-sized company shared that she had just given a $1 million cash signing bonus and $1 million in initial equity to a vice president of finance. “Sign-on bonuses and significant equity has blown up,” Emond notes. At that level, “companies are also a lot more willing to do significant buyouts they haven’t been willing to do before, for vested equity or potential bonuses that aren’t even guaranteed.”
In regards to your own job where would you like to see more improvement? Eg more paid leave, flexi time work, bonuses, over time payment.
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