As a “headhunter” a client recently called to have me conduct a search for them. They had lost an employee because he had gotten a significant increase in pay to take another job and quit. The employee retention expert and employee retention trainer in me was fascinated by this because rarely do people leave just for money. As I spoke with the human resources manager, it became clear to me what had happened in this case.
The employee had gotten a significant increase to leave. We are talking about a 20% increase. The human resources manager indicated there was not much they could do about that. But there was! Unfortunately, when developing their employee retention strategies they failed to look at a basic human resource area which was evaluating their pay scale regularly. They had not looked at their pay scale in over 5 years. Yes…they had been giving increases but they had failed to look at how the market was moving for this particular type of job. Had they done so, they would have realized that the market had moved significantly and they had fallen well behind the market with their pay structure.
Money is usually not the main motivator for someone leaving a job. That being said, whenever I do employee retention training with human resources professionals, I emphasize the need to regularly look at their pay scales as part of their employee retention strategies to make sure they are paying to the market. Had my search client done this, the person who left for a 20% increase because they were being paid well below market rates, may not have left if they had been looking at quitting for a 5% increase.
Money is usually not the primary motivator for leaving a job. However, if you are not evaluating your pay scales and paying market rates, please keep my contact information handy because you will need to call me to work as a “headhunter” and to conduct a search for you when you lose people because you are not paying market wages!
