How to budget for your post-COVID hires
(Hint: You should not be offering pre-COVID salaries)
“With the threat of COVID largely behind us, how should we budget for new hires? Should we revert back to pre-COVID compensation?”
We’re hearing these questions daily.
And our answer is that while companies are not offering the incredibly lucrative packages many candidates saw during COVID, organizations are also not reverting all the way back to pre-COVID numbers.
Hiring in 2023: What’s the market like out there?
In 2021 and half of 2022, our clients moved at breakneck speeds to snag their top candidates. This urgency led to an incredibly high demand for talent, and we were regularly making placements in as little as 30 days.
While today’s market is not as competitive as it was then and external data out there might lead you to believe it’s easy to find candidates right now, our team’s boots-on-the-ground experience says that it’s still difficult to make a great hire in 2023.
We can surmise this by looking at the time it’s taking our clients to hire. Currently, that number is moving back up toward our average of 47-50 days to hire. The good news is that hiring is not the most expensive it’s been in recent years. But it is still more costly than pre-2020.
The key question you should be asking when budgeting for this year is:
Would I have made this same offer in 2019?
If the answer is yes, you’re probably making a bad offer. Right now packages are landing closer to COVID numbers than they are 2019 numbers.
Looking for specifics? Get our free compensation guide
If you’re wondering what exactly this means when it comes to budgeting for specific positions in areas like sales, operations, engineering and marketing, we’ve created a FREE compensation guide that includes salary ranges based on experience level and title.
Read more
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