Lacey Partipilo and Brandon Laws discuss several interesting statistics from the Glassdoor Statistical Reference Guide for Recruiters, including why most millennials expect to leave their current organization by 2020, the factors related to CEO approval, and how many employees prefer additional benefits over a pay increase.
 

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Run Time: 21:37

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Brandon Laws: Lacey, we’re back. What’s up in the workplace?
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah, happy to be here.
Brandon Laws: I am glad we are doing this again. This is always fun.
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah, it should be good. This is going to be a good one.
Brandon Laws: We’re going to throw some data at some of our listeners today.
Lacey Partipilo: Yes.
Brandon Laws: You ran across this report. What’s the report?
Lacey Partipilo: So the report is from Glassdoor and it is a statistical reference guide for recruiters and I think just really for anybody in general, any organization that’s looking to try to lead the market really, 50 HR And Recruiting Statistics For 2017.
Brandon Laws: Yeah, this was I think geared more towards recruiters. But as I was looking through the data, I’m like, “Actual business owners and HR people would need to know this too, not just recruiters.”
Lacey Partipilo: Absolutely, right.
Brandon Laws: So I am glad you forwarded this to me because I think it’s really interesting. You’re using this for a workshop you have coming up, right?
Lacey Partipilo: I actually used it in a workshop I did last week. So I taught strategic hiring here at Xenium and incorporated some of these statistics into that because really I mean employers are looking at how do we differentiate ourselves in the marketplace. So I thought some of this information was helpful and really resonated with me. That’s what I’m seeing and hearing from the companies that I’m working with. So yeah.
Brandon Laws: So one thing I want to know before we dive through some of this data is we’re going to mention a lot of different numbers. We’re going to elaborate on that. There are different sources for each of the data points. So what we will do is we will put a link up to the PDF that Glassdoor put out and they have their sources of where they got the information. To go through it and then to cite it every time would be very boring for you listeners.
Lacey Partipilo: Yes.
Brandon Laws: And for us. So what I will do is I will just put a link up to the PDF, so you can actually find out where exactly they got the stat. Some of it was a mixture of their own data and it looked like Gallup polls and census data and all that. So they did a pretty good job of kind of putting it all together and making it meaningful for the audience.
Lacey Partipilo: I think so, yeah. I like the variety of the sources. I think it speaks to the fact that this is real stuff that’s happening out there.
Brandon Laws: Yeah. OK. So I want to start things off with a bang here. I’ve run across one stat and you have it highlighted. I see it on your side too. This was probably one we both chose. 66% of millennials expect to leave their organization by 2020.
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah.
Brandon Laws: I don’t even know what I’m doing next week. How can people even respond that way? That’s just fascinating to me.
Lacey Partipilo: Well, I think it comes some from the data that – there’s research out there that says that millennials will only stay in a job for 12 to 24 months.
Brandon Laws: Yeah.
Lacey Partipilo: So I think it’s the market, right? It’s hot here in Portland. It’s really kind of hot everywhere and the number of jobs out there really outnumbers the number of people that are actively looking. So I think that it’s not surprising to see that millennials are considering that or would consider having those kinds of conversations.
Brandon Laws: It just probably means that they don’t see any opportunity for growth there.
Lacey Partipilo: Right.
Brandon Laws: Or they will maximize their growth by that time period and then jump somewhere else that either pays more or has more growth opportunity.
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah.
Brandon Laws: So I think it’s like for employers, that’s a big wake-up call to say, “OK. If they’re only going to stay here a few more years, what do we do to either get the most out of them, develop them so maybe they want to stay? What can we do from a culture standpoint to keep them hooked?”
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah. I think employers need to be looking at that and also accepting of the fact that there may be positions within your company that are going to be higher turnover. So what are the right kind of people to put into those roles? And to not get discouraged when you have a position that didn’t use to be a high turnover position but now has become one. So finding ways to get information about what’s happening. Is it the market? Is it the company?
Brandon Laws: Yeah.
Lacey Partipilo: Are we stagnant doing stay interviews, exit interviews with people that are leaving to get that information? Because I think it’s different probably for each organization.
Brandon Laws: Crazy stat though.
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah.
Brandon Laws: What do you have?
Lacey Partipilo: OK. So something I thought that was interesting in here, it says that organizations that invest in a strong candidate experience improve their quality of hires by 70% and I think that is so true. When I’m talking with organizations about different people practices and systems that they’re putting into place, I really try to hone in on how important the hiring process is. I think most employer relations issues stem from either not giving feedback to people or not making a good decision during the hiring process and it goes both ways.
Brandon Laws: Yeah.
Lacey Partipilo: So candidates that have this great experience when they’re applying for – to work at your organization, you’re going to have a much better chance of getting somebody that’s going to be a good fit if their experience is good –
Brandon Laws: Talk about some of the ways that somebody can improve their candidate experience because it probably touches a lot of different things along the way, like probably a phone screen, an interview. Like what are the things that employers can really enhance?
Lacey Partipilo: I think having a consistent process just to start with is important, so that your employer brand is shining through. Following up with people. We just did the video on ghosting. So don’t ghost your candidates. Make sure that you’re following up with them. Stay engaged with them in the process. Giving people a realistic job preview I think is really important too.
So having them meet with other people on the team, doing tours, even sort of shadowing or watching some of the work could be done. I think those are things that organizations can do to make sure that the candidate experience is good. The other thing that is important in the market that we have now is to be quick to make decisions, smart decisions.
Brandon Laws: Yeah, that’s interesting.
Lacey Partipilo: But be quick because people are probably interviewing with more than one company and they may be sort of debating what to do and they may be getting an offer from another organization quicker than you’re moving.
Brandon Laws: Yeah.
Lacey Partipilo: So don’t be slow.
Brandon Laws: Do you remember – I think the stats are on that same page, the time to hire, the date – the number of days. What’s the – I think it’s right here on this calendar.
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah, it says the average opening sat unfilled for 28.1 days in 2016, which was up from 19.3 days, 2001 to 2002.
Brandon Laws: Interesting. So to me, those data points that you just talked about go hand in hand with that.
Lacey Partipilo: They do.
Brandon Laws: If you’re not creating a good experience moving things fast along, you might lose these people.
Lacey Partipilo: Absolutely, yeah. In 2001, 2003, the market was different. There were different people available. So it’s also saying in here the ratio right now of unemployed Americans to open jobs is 1.4 to 1 and it was 6.6 to 1 in the recession.
Brandon Laws: Geez.
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah. So if this is real, this is why employers are struggling to fill these jobs. So why we need to be so focused on retention.
Brandon Laws: There is another stat that actually ties in nicely with the candidate experience is the employer branding side, which is really the marketing, that culture, the thing that’s visible to candidates before they kind of get through that candidate experience. It’s said that organizations that invest in employer branding are three times more likely to have a quality hire.
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah.
Brandon Laws: That’s telling in and of itself.
Lacey Partipilo: Totally makes sense.
Brandon Laws: You’re basically going to draw in people that like the look of your culture. Maybe you have the same values and you’re basically speaking to them before they ever sort of opt in to the experience.
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah, and it’s not just whether people have the knowledge, skills and abilities to do the job, right? It’s whether they have that cultural fit and they’re going to behave in a way that emulates your company’s values. So it also mentions here in this report that the majority of Glassdoor users read seven reviews before forming an opinion of the company. So that’s part of your brand too.
So if you have not gone on Glassdoor and you are not looking to see what your rating is and there’s the CEO rating, there’s your organizational rating, there’s – people can leave qualitative reviews on there just like they can on Yelp or any other of those sites.
Brandon Laws: And a whole lot of weight.
Lacey Partipilo: You should be. They hold a ton of weight. So you really should be looking at that and we want authentic feedback.
Brandon Laws: Yeah.
Lacey Partipilo: So I would encourage companies to reply to all of those reviews, be thoughtful about it, encourage people, your current employees to go on there and give feedback too. It’s just interesting that people are – they’re really looking at that when they form their opinions.
Brandon Laws: What’s bizarre recently within the last couple of weeks, I was talking with our VP of HR and we were talking about Glassdoor and how it has become such an important piece. We’re not trying to purposely plug Glassdoor because this is their report. I’m just trying to illustrate the fact that Glassdoor is a huge component to employer branding.
Lacey Partipilo: It is.
Brandon Laws: And if you don’t pay attention to it, that’s a huge miss on your part because you may have negative reviews. You may have people like really looking at the profile before they start applying for jobs or you may have something that you’re just completely missing.
One of the things I just wanted to note from a marketing standpoint is – search engine optimization is one of my skill sets, right? Making our website rank high on Google and other content, right?
Well if you Google your brand keyword, more than likely – and this goes true for anybody. More than likely, you’re going to have your website as number one and Glassdoor seems to always be number two.
Lacey Partipilo: Really?
Brandon Laws: Always, always. So if you’re listening, you can try it out.
Lacey Partipilo: What would you Google if you were –?
Brandon Laws: So if I type in “Xenium HR,” the website would be number one. Glassdoor would be number two and the thing about Glassdoor that makes it interesting is that they have metadata and little short snippets that Google is starting to pull through the search engine listings. So they will bring in the rating, the stars. So that – as a user, you’re looking at the –
Lacey Partipilo: It’s your visual right there.
Brandon Laws: It is. So here’s the thing is if you’re looking at search engine rankings, you basically have top three results above the fold. OK, the website shows maybe some pages underneath and then the second is Glassdoor but it has a star rating. Well, as a candidate, you would be like, “Ding, ding, ding. I’m going to go look at the ratings.”
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah.
Brandon Laws: It’s immediate and you go start reading reviews.
Lacey Partipilo: Right.
Brandon Laws: So pay attention to this. It’s not going away.
Lacey Partipilo: No, and Glassdoor says that boosting employee satisfaction by one Glassdoor rating point raises your market value of your organization by 7.9 percent.
Brandon Laws: How do they even calculate that?
Lacey Partipilo: I don’t know. I’m curious about that. But it is interesting and you think about it. When you have happy, engaged employees, they’re more productive. More productive employees lead to an organization that is delivering on what they’re supposed to be – producing goods, providing service, whatever your company does. I think it makes sense.
Brandon Laws: Yeah.
Lacey Partipilo: When people are happy, they do better work.
Brandon Laws: There’s another stat that I wanted to bring up before we kind of shift gears because a lot of this is tied to benefits and comp and I want to make sure we have time for that. The report said that an average of 7.6 job sites are used during the job-seeking process. So we’re talking about Glassdoor and how much weight that holds. But there’s also a lot of other websites and job boards and job postings out there that people are using to find the right job like LinkedIn, Indeed.
Lacey Partipilo: Right.
Brandon Laws: You know, CareerBuilder, Monster, all those different sites. So I think putting all your eggs in one basket would be a bad idea.
Lacey Partipilo: Agreed, agreed.
Brandon Laws: I think spreading the love across some of these job sites would be a good idea.
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah, and looking at – for your industry too, are there networking sites? Are there newsletters that you can post in? The question that I usually throw out to clients is, “If you were going to start looking for another job, what site would you go to?” because we should be looking at posting on those sites. So I shared that statistic in the hiring and training that I did just to get people thinking about if you’re posting to two or three sites, you’re missing out.
Brandon Laws: Yeah.
Lacey Partipilo: Because what this data is telling us is that people are broadening their search. They’re not just going to Indeed. They’re not just going to Craigslist anymore. So we need to be thoughtful.
Brandon Laws: It’s all of the above.
Lacey Partipilo: Right.
Brandon Laws: For sure. This is interesting but I’ve run across one of those stats that was talking about CEO approval because if you noticed on Glassdoor, they have the ratings for CEO approval and that’s just part of I think the review process. But what they found was that if you want to correlate a really high CEO approval, there are three factors in play. Employee satisfaction, satisfaction with senior leaderships and not just the CEO.
Lacey Partipilo: Right.
Brandon Laws: The executive team and senior leadership team and then satisfaction with career opportunities.
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah.
Brandon Laws: I wholeheartedly agree with all of these things.
Lacey Partipilo: Oh, so do I. I think that the CEO is a reflection of all of that and lots more.
Brandon Laws: One hundred percent. Yeah, agreed, agreed.
Lacey Partipilo: So because of that, good or bad, the CEO is sort of going to have to be held accountable to how those people show up, how this shows up within the organization. Absolutely.
Brandon Laws: These are things that they can directly control or indirectly based on people they hire.
Lacey Partipilo: Right.
Brandon Laws: Yeah. OK. So let’s shift gears a little bit.
Lacey Partipilo: OK.
Brandon Laws: There’s a section on pay, benefits and all that. You have some stats on there.
Lacey Partipilo: I do.
Brandon Laws: Let’s go through some of those.
Lacey Partipilo: So when we were talking about just high job satisfaction, obviously that correlates to your organization performing better. This says that 84 percent of employees with high benefit satisfaction report high job satisfaction. It sort of seems like a no-brainer, right?
Brandon Laws: Yeah.
Lacey Partipilo: But when we’re talking about benefits as we kind of go through this, we would want the listeners to really think about things outside of just your health plan, right?
Brandon Laws: Yeah.
Lacey Partipilo: Because total rewards has really – like the door has just been busted open and employers are getting really creative with the perks and benefits that they’re offering. So I think that’s what this is speaking to is work-life balance, flexibility, some of those things that are intangible too.
Brandon Laws: Yeah. We found it in our – and we will have some stats when we’re finally done with the survey but the Beyond Compensation: Total Rewards Survey that we did, we have a ton of great data there and it’s funny that people are putting a lot of emphasis on benefits.
Lacey Partipilo: They are, they are, and it’s important to employees.
Brandon Laws: Yeah.
Lacey Partipilo: So some of this research in here talks about that, how important benefits are.
Brandon Laws: Yeah. I think why it is, is because there’s so much data around compensation. I’m just speculating here. There’s so much data around compensation that we can – as an HR person or a CEO of a small company you have access to. You can hire a third party like us to run wage surveys for you. There’s other data sets out there that you could purchase. So everybody is kind of at the market as far as like what they’re paying out.
Yeah, you might have employers like Netflix as a whole who need really creative people and engineers to create a great product. So they might pay above market. But generally, most people are just trying to pay that 50th percentile.
Lacey Partipilo: Right.
Brandon Laws: So then the differentiator is benefits and perks.
Lacey Partipilo: Yes.
Brandon Laws: That’s why there’s so much emphasis is because people know that if they go jump job to job, they’re probably going to only make on the margin a little bit more.
Lacey Partipilo: Right.
Brandon Laws: But what’s actually going to mean more is the benefits and that could be flexible work stuff. It could be take your dog to work.
Lacey Partipilo: Right.
Brandon Laws: It could be massages. You know, all of the above, right? And that’s why there’s – I’m just guessing that’s probably why people are rating benefits so highly.
Lacey Partipilo: I think so and I think it’s because employers have a lot of discretion and control in this area and candidates and employees have an expectation that an employer is going to respond to what the needs of the business are and some organizations value different things and so when we talk about aligning people with companies in terms of culture, that’s something they’re looking at. If I’m looking for an organization that values giving back to the community, I want to work for one that maybe offers some time-off so that I can go volunteer.
Brandon Laws: Agreed, yeah. It’s funny. Similar to the stat you gave about the 84 percent with high benefit satisfaction report or high job satisfaction, 80 percent of the workers would prefer new and additional benefits to a pay increase and that’s 90 percent for millennials.
Lacey Partipilo: I’m so not surprised about that.
Brandon Laws: You’re not surprised but at the same time, I’m like, “That’s a ridiculous stat.”
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah.
Brandon Laws: So people would rather get more benefits or new benefits rather than have a pay increase? Mind-blowing.
Lacey Partipilo: I feel like this probably is – there’s some assumption maybe and I’m making this up. But that these people are at least paid at market because I do –
Brandon Laws: Yes, that has got to be it.
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah, I do think that the foundational relationship between employer and employee is the paycheck, right? So as long as that is OK and at market and I feel like I’m being paid fairly, then I think it is an expectation that our people are going to want us to continue to stay at market and be creative with our benefits.
Brandon Laws: Yeah.
Lacey Partipilo: So that’s interesting.
Brandon Laws: I believe it.
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah.
Brandon Laws: The other thing that’s like beyond the compensation and benefits, there’s also the intangible stuff like on-the-job experience and learning opportunities and it’s said that 63 percent of millennials believe that their leadership skills have not been fully developed. Then I wonder if there’s some sort of correlation between that and them not seeing that there’s a vision for them and after 2020 and people are going to bail at that point.
Lacey Partipilo: It could be –
Brandon Laws: They want to be developed.
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah, they do.
Brandon Laws: And they want to have those opportunities to be leaders.
Lacey Partipilo: I think so and I think there was a statistic in here that said only 4% of people in leadership positions know how to talk to millennials or know how to work with millennials.
Brandon Laws: Bizarre.
Lacey Partipilo: That is frightening.
Brandon Laws: Yeah. OK. I’m going to put in a plug. There’s a book Millennials and Management. I had interviewed Lee Caraher a couple of times on the podcast. That book is great because it does talk a lot about communication with the millennial group.
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah. Does it say that you should just be texting them and –?
Brandon Laws: I think you got to meet them where they’re at. But I think it’s just you got to be open with them.
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah.
Brandon Laws: They’re not babies.
Lacey Partipilo: No.
Brandon Laws: They want to be treated like adults.
Lacey Partipilo: Super smart. Transparency is important.
Brandon Laws: They care about being tied to the company. They want to know that their contributions are impacting the greater good.
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah.
Brandon Laws: You and I are both millennials and we both feel the same way.
Lacey Partipilo: Absolutely.
Brandon Laws: We would rather have transparent and open and honest feedback and all of the – learning about financial status. We want to know where the business is going, all of those things, and I think the more that you can do that in a really open way, millennials will stay around.
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah. That builds loyalty.
Brandon Laws: Yes.
Lacey Partipilo: And I think it shows millennials and really all of your employees that you trust them with that information and you believe that they can make an impact to help grow the business. So millennials aren’t all bad.
Brandon Laws: I agree. Well, we could literally go through …
Lacey Partipilo: We could.
Brandon Laws: … this entire report. But we’re not because we’re out of time. One thing I wanted to mention is that we are doing a survey of our own. Every year we’ve done this, What People Want from Work survey. It’s a really good opportunity to ask your employees what they want out of their work. It covers a lot of these areas.
Lacey Partipilo: It does.
Brandon Laws: Surprisingly. So basically what happens is we have the survey – we’ve been doing this for four years now. We will give you communication to roll out to your employees and then we will calculate everything and you guys get a nice free report as a result of it and there are some buy-up options and what not. But I think the free report gives you a lot of what you need.
Lacey Partipilo: Absolutely. The more data we have across different industries, different employer sizes, the better.
Brandon Laws: We’ve already had a great response. So it’s always nice to get – I’m trying to push it a little bit more because the more and more data you have, to your point, we’re going to really figure out. We’re going to get a pulse on what the employees really want.
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah.
Brandon Laws: It’s definitely trending.
Lacey Partipilo: Great. We should put the link out.
Brandon Laws: For sure.
Lacey Partipilo: So that people have it.
Brandon Laws: Yeah. Well, thanks for joining, Lacey. This was fun.
Lacey Partipilo: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for having me.