71% of all workers in the United States are actively looking for a job, even those that are currently employed. If you’re one of the over 1.53 million nonprofit organizations recruiting new talent, you need an edge to persuade the top candidates to choose your company. One major draw for job seekers is salary and benefits packages. Do you know if your organization is offering similar, or better, wages than your top competitors?
If you aren’t sure or if you haven’t done any real research in recent years (or even months!), you should consider hiring a third party to conduct a salary survey. While these can be costly, the benefits of a salary survey will outweigh the costs when you hire the best people. Depending on how many participants you include and what kind of data you want to analyze, these surveys can take over six months to plan and execute.
Organizations use a salary survey to benchmark their compensation packages against those of their competitors. It allows you to see the range of salaries for a particular job in your field so you can raise or lower salaries accordingly within your organization. It may happen that you are over paying your employees unknowingly and you can save a lot of money moving forward by adjusting new hire salaries.
Staffing agencies sometimes have salary survey data available for free to the public on their websites. You can use this for your own research or hire an outside researcher to conduct a more specific, in depth study. By conducting your own, you can pick and choose what data is collected and from where so the salary survey is much more valuable to your organization.
Another thing to remember is that the salary survey data you can view publicly on staffing agency websites is also available to job seekers. If your salary package is not as appealing as your competitor’s package, job candidates can see that and you risk losing out on top talent.
With nonprofits accounting for over 9% of all wages paid in 2010, the demand for nonprofit jobs is on the rise. As an organization, you can’t afford to miss out on quality employees because your compensation packages are inferior. Using research and salary surveys can give you the competitive edge you need in your sector to win over job candidates and maximize your recruiting success!
