To heighten the awareness of next week's National Payroll Week, Savant is publishing a number of blogs focused on the challenges that Payroll faces in the current environment.
Next week marks the CIPP’s National Payroll Week in the UK. In their own words “National Payroll Week was established in the UK by the CIPP in 1998 to celebrate the payroll profession and to give it the recognition it deserves.”
With that being said, a number of our clients and a variety of other organisations really struggle to recruit within payroll. In the 8 years that I’ve recruited for payroll across London and the home counties, it has always been a skills short market. It’s an essential skill set for almost every company and yet organisations just can’t get people through the door. With that in mind, here’s a few areas that you need to focus on;
What are your essential skill requirements?
Payroll can be broken down relatively easily into tasks and volumes and values.
Even if all the above are relevant to you, the question you need to ask yourself is which is essential and which can be trained. For example, if you have a candidate that has run payroll across Spain, Germany and Portugal but not Italy, are the differences between Italy and the other countries mentioned trainable or do you not have anyone else in the business with that knowledge. If you can make that slight adjustment, your candidate pool would be much wider.
What makes you a more appealing option to candidates?
Payroll is and always has been a skills short market. Sometimes, it comes down to basic supply and demand. The higher the demand, the shorter the supply and so the price goes up. It might seem like a simple solution but if your salary and package offering is better than your competitors, you have a higher chance of employing and retaining the best talent. However, in 2022 there’s a variety of new factors that people are taking into account when choosing an employer. For example, one of my clients' whole payroll (and HR) function is fully remote. While this has no added cost to a business, it effectively gives their employees a £5k a year pay rise due to the lack of a commute and gives them back 5-10 hours a week on commuting time. Most of them use that extra time to do more work. The other benefit this has for the company is that they can employ candidates across the UK where the cost of living is lower and, therefore, can reduce the salary for new employees.
Another cost free benefit candidates are making decisions on at the moment is flexible working patterns; starting later to do the school run, working 4 x 10 hour days instead of 5 x 8 hour days or moving their working hours in a flexible way to better suit their lifestyle.
Gone are the days of the 8 hours a day, 5 days a week in the office where a free lunch on a Friday and office beers at the end of the month are a benefit. You really need to ask what your value proposition to candidates is versus what value they are to you.
Have you thought outside of the box/what you’d consider the norm?
This might seem like a controversial opinion but when you’re recruiting, why is a certain qualification or background essential for you? I’ve worked with a number of companies over the years that have always traditionally recruited Big 4 trained newly qualified accountants looking for their first move into industry. However, when challenged, only a few could actually justify why. Are you still recruiting into payroll the same type of profile that you recruited 5 or even 10 years ago? Maybe consider changing these parameters as the candidate you interview might surprise you.
If you want to have a conversation about how we can support you with recruitment or onboarding, what challenges there are in the market or have a confidential discussion about your own career, please do reach out to us on finance@savantrecruitment.com
