At job interviews, people are accustomed to citing the following for reasons for starting a job search: lack of opportunity or challenge, slow or stagnant career growth, better salary, poor culture fit etc.
Which of these are truths and how can we attract our talent of choice?
Contrary to popular belief, money is not the number one driver for why people leave jobs.
When people say they feel underpaid, what they actually mean is, they feel undervalued.
Our relationship with money as the currency for employment is a minefield of emotion, self-believe and outside work financial commitments.
Money is just one of the factors on a checklist that’s often cited as the main reason for people looking to move jobs but it’s not the most important.
The average human spends about 110 hours awake in a week. If you work a 10-hour day with an hour commuting you spend 55 per cent of your waking hours at getting to or at work. It’s a big deal and the value exchange needs to be there for your time.
In the digital age, we’ve access to real-time information. One can find salary guides anywhere in the world on the internet.
Salaries are dynamic and companies often refer to salary guides to benchmark against their industry. However, in the current job market and for digital talent changing sector and changing discipline are much more achievable.
The challenge here is how candidates and employers benchmark their salaries and particularly for companies to pull in data in associated fields
To illustrate the above point, when working with a UX/UI hybrid candidate, they could be placed in either an MNC, a start-up, a tech company, a digital agency a consulting firm and in any industry.
Is staff turnover a bad thing?
It’s worth pointing out that employee attrition is a healthy part of the business.
Zero turnover is actually concerning as your company will get no new ideas and people may become set in their ways – and being comfortable is a massive barrier to change.
Change and evolution in Industry 4.0 are what stops a business from going bust!
From a company’s perspective, you should try to understand the average turnover rates in your industry, so you can benchmark yourself against them.
If your attrition rate is higher than average, then you probably have issues!
If you have very low or no turnover, you probably have issues too but you just don’t know about them yet.
There are lots of reasons why people leave jobs but let’s bring it back to the lens of digital talent and talk about the workplace again.
Why do digital talent leave jobs?
There are several key reasons why digital talent leaves a company and the reverse is what attract people. They go something like this:
- Lack of understanding from senior company leaders about the digital economy
- Lack of investment in digital projects
- Wrong cooperate set up to drive innovation and agility
- Old fashioned functional department structures and reporting lines creating a hindrance to progress
- Benchmarking the old against the new from a skills perspective e.g. we have employed print designers before and expected them to work this way and pay them this much. We now want to employ web designers but our views remain unchanged
- Legacy IT infrastructure and systems creating a barrier to innovation
These are not quick fixes.
If you want to attract and hold onto digital talent, these issues create dramatic organisational change. Otherwise, you will have a revolving door of talent.