Maintenance Engineer Salaries in the West Midlands

As part of our cutting through the noise series, we reviewed maintenance engineer jobs across the West Midlands to find out what your competition is offering. The first part of the series covers the salaries and bonus/shift allowances that companies are offering maintenance engineers.

This article will breakdown:

• the Salaries of Maintenance Engineers in the West Midlands.
• An overview of the bonuses and allowances being offered.
• Our Maintenance Engineer Recruiters insight with top tips on how to improve. 

Maintenance Engineer Salaries in the West Midlands

The salary insights were interesting, to say the least.

We looked at roles and created an average salary for a Maintenance Engineer, regardless of shift, bias or experience (we’ll be working on this in our next series). This is what we found:

Based on what we have been speaking with employers and candidates, these averages we’re a little on the low side. This is to be expected, as we are doing a median salary across all roles and days roles will naturally decrease this. Due to them being lower in comparison to other shifts. We’re hoping to be able to do a proper breakdown of Role > Shift > Location at the end of the year to give you more insight.

However, it is interesting to see the differences between each area. What was interesting to see was the way that employers display salary (Base rate vs a salary range) and the variants of top on-target earnings (if an OTE was clearly displayed on the advert).

Salary ranges of Maintenance Engineers

Most of the adverts displayed their salary as a range (64.06%). This makes sense as you can:

• Show engineers the full scope of earning
• Attract more engineers to roles as there is a wider range of salaries that will match their search.

This is the overview of the difference between the minimum and maximum salary that employers offer (e.g. £30k – £35k):

As you can see, the salary scope that some employers offer can be huge. With some offering a 25k+ difference between their offering- which is mental.

This can pose an issue for candidate attraction for some employers, as this salary range is the difference from someone that’s green to an experienced engineer. The issue is that you can confuse potential engineers on what the salary is and you could end up paying a lot more than the business can afford or missing out on a great engineer.

The key takeaway from this is when opting to use a range think about how realistic it is and is it really worth something to engineers.

In addition, if you’re recruiting for multiple roles in the business, avoid trying to use one advert to attract everyone. As you’ll end up attracting no one. This is largely due to adverts needing to be tailored to who your ideal candidate is, and the needs of someone on the floor vs management are very different.

If you’re not interested in what bonuses/ shift allowances your competitors are offering maintenance engineers, you can jump to our recruiters’ recommendations on how to use your salaries to maximise the results of job adverts (or candidate attraction in general).

Maintenance Engineer Salaries in the West Midlands: Bonuses / Shift Allowances

73% of the adverts that we surveyed didn’t mention a bonus/shift allowance structure. So, if you have one implemented in the business, this is definitely something that you should be shouting about in your adverts. As it is a fantastic opportunity to stand out from the competition.

Of those that did mention, it did range from a flat quarterly or annual bonus, shift premium or percentage bonus. These are a few that we found of interest:

• A few companies implemented a quarterly bonus, with the highest at 14 %.
• Shift allowances ranged from £1000 – £4,200

In terms of shift allowances, Jonny commented on these figures that these are lower than we typically see. Normally, you will see a figure that is similar to 15-25%, so it was interesting to see that employers were offering this range in their adverts.

We cannot stress enough that if have a bonus structure or shift allowance in place, talk about it and give some degree of detail. Avoid just saying ‘bonus’ (which many businesses do), as this isn’t going to attract or get engineers to apply to the role.

One recommendation could be to show your bonus/shift structure as an example of earning over the past 1/3/5 years. As this gives a real-life scenario of the true earning potential of your job. This will help to attract and convert those few engineers that are applying to roles.

Our Recruiters Suggestions.

Jonny Gardner, our senior recruitment consultant in the West Midlands, worked with us when reviewing this data. His insight into what’s going on in the area has proved invaluable to this campaign. So, we asked him what he would recommend employers do with their salaries on job adverts.

His 3 top points that businesses should do is:

1. Consider increasing your salary/earning potential to compete with the competition;
2. Write about the earning potential on a job advert; and
3. Don’t put ‘competitive’ as a salary, competitive doesn’t pay bills! This will only alienate engineers applying through the advert.

We also asked for his thoughts on how businesses should implement bonuses of any form the business.

” I think companies should look at longevity bonuses if this is possible. The biggest cost to a business currently is losing good employees (in this case, good maintenance engineers). 

Maybe an incentive to help keep engineers or a pay structure that entices engineers to carry on working for a company. It is also important to mention money is only a small part of keeping hold of engineers.

A lot of engineers value a good working culture and feel appreciated with options for further training being the number one reason why engineers are currently looking to move on. (but we will speak about this in more detail later).

Make Earning Potential Transparent

There is a time old argument about salary transparency on job adverts. So, we were very happy to see that only a handful of adverts used terms like Competitive, Negotiable or excellent in replace of a salary (around 3.65% of adverts we viewed used these terms).

However, there were still some businesses that choose to not disclose a salary at all (around 6.25% in fact!), which in today’s competitive market is madness.

We always put a salary on the job adverts we create for maintenance engineer roles, as engineers expect to know what they will be earning. As a result, not displaying any salary or earning potential will hamper your advert’s ability to attract engineers.

We’d always recommend selling the full earning potential of a role. So businesses should be putting those highest OTE and bonuses on adverts to attract engineers. However, the key is to be transparent with this and state if the salary is base or OTE- you can even separate the two to make it easier to understand. Whilst many engineers will go off OTE, these often aren’t guaranteed so they need to ensure that base wage can cover their means.

In summary

The essence of this research is to be transparent and shout about the earning potential. Nothing should be missed and you should avoid using adjectives to describe your salaries.

Although this is one of many factors that influence engineers to move, it is the one that pays their bills, so shouldn’t be neglected or dampened.  

In this candidate-driven market, you must do all you can in the initial stages of candidate attraction to get noticed by good engineers first. So, you need to be:

1. Selling what you offer 
2. Thinking about how you can improve your offering to get ahead of the competition.

What’s next in our hiring insights series?

This is the first part of our cutting through the noise series. The next topic is the type of shifts and what overtime your competitors are offering. Follow us to see more!