The candidate market has undergone significant change over the last six months but some fundamentals still remain steady. Recruitment is a dynamic process and it has been heavily influenced recently by the prevailing economic conditions, in order to assist our clients, Frontline Recruitment Group endeavours to provide contemporary market data specific to your industry so that you can continually "tweak" your candidate attraction strategies.
In our last edition we shared with you our findings of Candidate Behaviour based on specific surveys conducted by Frontline Recruitment Group and the research that was conducted by Career One. This month we continue with three important factors to candidates: Job Satisfaction, Travel and Training.
Unlike values, needs aren’t consistent across all job hunters or across time. There is a considerable difference in the priority given to the 71 different needs triggers Career One tested across 14 different categories that affect the way Australian workers feel about their jobs.
Being close to work and having the chance to travel for work are still the top two reasons to change jobs, but the big difference now centres on pay. A job offering better salary is now far more attractive than it was 12 months ago, along with the jobs offering better career options or more satisfaction.
Job Satisfaction
We asked retail candidates to rate in order of importance the most important factor to obtain Job Satisfaction with a career in Retail and they responded with Job Security as the most important factor.
1. Job Security – Most important for Assistant managers and Management roles
2. Training & Development - Most important for Store managers and above
3. Working Conditions - Very important for Store based and Management roles
4. Opportunity for Advancement - Very important for Assistant managers
5. Work Environment - Most important for Management roles
6. Challenges – Important for Store based roles
50% of the candidates interviewed were at Management Level, 30% in store based roles and the balance were made up of Assistant Mangers and Supervisors.
The average salary candidates surveyed were on in Retail, was between $35K-55K.
Travelling
Being close to work is still a top reason and a temptation to change jobs.
We found 60% of Retail candidates’ travel 10kms or more, 30% travel 1-5kms, 9% travel 5-10kms and only 1% travel less than a kilometre to work each day.
On average, 20-60 minutes travel time by car was normal for Retail candidates to commute to work and in addition 20-60 minutes was also found to be reasonable in regards to total travel time.
Training
In last months edition we found Candidates at all levels identified training as extremely important for them. With this information we wanted to go one step further and find out, what type of training programs or developmental opportunities Retail Candidates are provided with in their previous or current roles.
We found 80% of Retail Candidates had done a Formal External Course which consisted of mostly Team building, leadership, communication or Managerial/Supervisory training and also had done a variety of Orientation for new employees and Computer software courses.
15% of Retail Candidates had done an Acting Role in a more senior position which consisted of mostly Managerial/Supervisory training and also had done a variety of Team building, leadership and communication and Group decision-making or problem solving courses.
The remaining 5% was made up of Mentoring Schemes, Peer Support Programs and Team Projects.
Training courses took 1-5 days to complete and we found 50% of the training was provided by an outside trainer, 40% of the training was provided by an in house trainer and 10% of the training was provided by a Supervisor.
Training mostly took place away from the work place and was almost always during normal working hours.
The largest segment of job hunters was found to be represented by the supportive environment group. 15% of this group would consider leaving their job if there were jobs with better training programs.
They are looking for a friendly team-based environment with training and mentoring schemes in place to help them through the change process. Around 12% are content and the same numbers are actively searching for a job using newspapers, general and specialist job websites.
Frontline Recruitment Group publishes this information so that you may have access to contemporary statistical data and use it to assist in your recruitment strategies…
Please feel free to contact us at Frontline Retail. with any recruitment requirements - we are here to help.