What employee perks will convince a candidate to choose you in 2019?

What employee perks will convince a candidate to choose you in 2019?

In a candidate led job market employers must be offering competitive packages to their prospective employees. According to Glassdoor more than a third of employees admit that perks and benefits are amongst their top considerations before accepting a new job.

In the current market candidates may be receiving multiple offers before finalising their next move. It’s important to make sure your offer stands out to win the best talent. While our experience is that salespeople tend to be highly coin-operated and cash incentives will always be popular, it’s not always realistic to just offer the biggest pay packet so what else works?

We see some remarkable packages on offer every day, so we’ve compiled our favourites (and our candidate’s favourites) especially for you!

Exceptional Perks

• The exceptional deal of giving a Porsche to the sales person of the year
• Giving all employees 40 days holiday (subject to hitting targets)
• Offering 250% accelerator on achievement of 150% bonus

Share schemes

There is a trend, particularly within start-up tech firms, to offer new employees the opportunity to acquire shares in their new employer.  Owning part of the business incentivises employees to stick with the business and help to make it a success.  When a candidate is excited about the potential of a role but the salary offered doesn’t meet their expectations, the ability to offer share options can help influence the candidate’s decision in your favour.

Mix up your pension offering

The nature of a sales role means that your base salary is considerably lower than what’s in your take home pay packet.  This is particularly relevant when you look at pension contributions. Millennials will make up 50% of the workforce by 2020 and this generation are highly aware of the importance of building up their pension pots early. One of our cyber security clients offers a 6% matched pension contribution for any deal the employee closes rather than just the standard 6% of their annual salary.

Annual Leave

Around 50% of the roles we fill offer more than 25 days holiday plus bank holidays.  Smaller companies tend to offer less competitive annual leave packages while for the larger firms 25 days has become the ‘norm’.  There are other companies exploring more innovative annual leave packages to attract the best talent.

Netflix has proven that offering staff unlimited annual leave can reap rewards for the company.  After implementing the policy two years ago they saw a decrease in the number of sick days being taken and a huge increase in the engagement levels of their team.  This policy only works in organisations with a high level of trust between management and staff, however when implemented it has been used as a key attraction technique for industries where talent is sought after such as technology.

A small software business we work with has been labelled by The Sunday Times as one of the Top 25 Best Small Companies to work for. This company offers charity days where their team are encouraged to volunteer for a cause they care about and take it as additional annual leave.

Company holidays

Company wide holidays are becoming a much more common employee benefit.  With ski trips, city breaks and party weekends you’ll often see these mini-holidays littering your LinkedIn feed.  Regular holidays for exceptional team members are popular as are annual team weekenders. Salespeople often don’t take all their annual leave, effectively forcing your team to have time off gives them a well-earned rest.

One software development company we heard about offers their employees a fully paid week long team holiday every two years.  They found this not only helped with attraction but also improved their employee retention rate as staff wanted to stay for the next big holiday.

WOW benefits

Working with sales people we see a lot of WOW benefits being the tipping factor contributing to their accepting of an offer.  A good example of a benefit that isn’t revenue based comes from one of our clients who have a log cabin on Lake Windemere; every quarter all employees are entered a ballot for the opportunity to win a weekend in the cabin.  Another client gives the year’s best salesperson a Porsche TO KEEP!!! Now it doesn’t need to be quite as bank breaking as a log cabin or sports car, other material goods such as a MacBook or iPhone also go down well with the candidates we speak to!

Flexible Working

A study by psychologist Daniel Kahneman and economist Alan Kruegar revealed that commuting was ranked as our least favourite activity (alongside household chores).  Offering your team homeworking benefits or flexible hours can really help sway potential future employees.

As salespeople are traditionally very money oriented, other forms of flexible contracts are appreciated. For instance the ability to trade annual leave for money, buy additional holiday or carry over unused holiday to the following year are all highly popular.

Bonus schemes

Bonuses and sales go together like bread and butter right? It’s expected in a sales role to have a revenue led target. More recently we’ve seen a trend towards employers offering a twist on a classic bonus scheme.  For example, one major software company we work with offers their new employees a bonus that balances revenue targets with activity KPI targets.  They found this increases employee motivation in their first year plus the focus on activity naturally fed into increased revenue!

Parental Leave

Shared parental leave is increasingly popular among our candidates. We’re finally in a world of equal parenting where equal maternity and paternity benefits are hugely appreciated.  One of our clients, one of biggest technology companies in the UK, offers six months paternity leave for their team.

Summary

While having a competitive pay packet is always going to be important for salespeople the final decision can ultimately be swayed by the supportive package provided by the employer.  If you’re losing talent to your competitors post offer it might be time to review what you’re offering to check it’s as good as it could be.

For more information or insights about the above, or if you’d like some support with your recruitment leads drop us a call (0161 446 4169) or an email (info@enterprisesp.co.uk)!