What Benefits are Maintenance Engineers Offered in the West Midlands?
It’s the end of our first West Midlands hiring insights series. Together we have covered the vast array of factors engineers consider when looking to move jobs. Now, we’re going to look at potentially the most challenging aspect. The benefits your competitors offer their engineers.
We hear employers say ‘we don’t have any benefits’ time and time again. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. When you analyse your business and offers, you will ALWAYS find something that benefits an engineer.
In this blog, we’re going to cover:
- The number of benefits that your competitors offer engineers in their adverts
- The most frequently mentioned benefit and our top 10 benefits (along with a few that shouldn’t have been mentioned)
Our engineering recruitment team will share their insight throughout, which will be invaluable as they speak with engineers daily. As a result, they have a profound insight into engineers’ expectations.
What is a benefit?
What engineers consider to be a benefit has changed over time.
A benefit is something that improves the quality of your engineers’ work or home life. In many instances, the company will see the financial cost of the benefit. Though it is not unheard of to have salary sacrifice schemes or for there to be a small cost to the engineer. Nevertheless, it is a cost that all businesses need to make if they’re looking to improve retention rates.
Aspects like the training and progression opportunities you provide could be considered a benefit. However, for many engineers, this is now a standard part of their package! For our analysis, if these aspects (training/progression/holiday package/pension) were cited multiple times in the advert, we counted one instance towards the metrics below.
How are your competitors talking about their benefits in adverts?
Now that we understand a little more about what benefits are. We can talk about how your competitors are talking about them in adverts.
Let’s start by addressing that 32.29% of businesses mentioned no benefits in their adverts. In this market, businesses should do everything possible to sell their company and distinguish themselves from the competition. It is crazy that nearly a third of employers have not included any benefits.
Additionally, to see that just 45.31% of companies mentioned more than one isn’t great to see. We found that this equated to nearly 23% of businesses only including one benefit in their adverts– which is not enough to attract engineers and sell the business.
The steep drop in businesses mentioning multiple benefits was of concern, with only 30.21% of companies citing 3 benefits in their adverts. We’d always recommend including 3 or more benefits in your adverts. Simply because you need to be going the extra mile to sell your business. But, this could be a blessing in disguise for businesses. As so few are going into detail, you have an excellent opportunity to stand out from the competition.
The highest number of benefits that we saw from employers was 6. Whilst this won’t be achievable for many businesses, this level of detail was fantastic as it gives potential engineers a real insight into what they offer and why they’re better than the rest.
The most frequently mentioned benefits in adverts.
There was a variety of benefits that businesses included. Here is an overview of the most frequently mentioned ones:
There isn’t too much to talk about with this. We will go into further detail about why you might not want to include company devices as a benefit below. But, most of the above are standard benefits that maintenance engineers are currently looking for.
Truthfully, we expected to see more mentions of Christmas shutdowns. As we know that this is something that many businesses implement and is a huge selling point. Especially if this period is on top of a holiday package, so engineers don’t need to use their accrued days during this time.
Our top 10 benefits that the company mentioned
We’ve gone through the most frequently mentioned benefits. Here is our engineering recruitment team’s top pick from the adverts. Based on the conversations that they’ve had with engineers.
- Childcare Vouchers
- Health insurances and death in service packages
- Discounts from retailers
- Talking about the environment and what is unique to the business e.g. clean, automated with robotics
- Paid breaks or the extra breaks.
- Company shutdowns that aren’t inclusive of holiday packages
- Advanced Sick Pay
- Free social events for team and family
- Holiday Trading or earning holiday with service
- Onsite gyms and other amenities.
Truthfully there are a host of benefits that you could implement for your engineers. The best way to determine what to have is to ask your team directly. If you don’t know what their current frustrations are or what they’d like to have, you could risk losing engineers if you proceed without a plan.
Benefits that should be taken with a pinch of salt.
There were a few adverts with benefits that should be taken with a pinch of salt. As the expectations of today’s engineers have changed. Subsequently, these are now considered to be a standard part of their package:
- Salary Reviews
- 24/7 colleague assistance
- Paid holidays (yes that was a benefit!)
- Company Devices (unless you go into detail about the brand, in which case it is better but is still a base-package expectation from engineers)
Whilst we do recommend digging deep when evaluating what your business has to offer engineers. We would still suggest that you put yourself in an engineer’s shoes and think if this is actually of benefit to them. Or, is it needed to do their job?
Advice from our engineering recruitment team.
There is a lot of information to process with this blog. But that also means that there are also a lot of opportunities. Before you go diving into restructuring your engineer’s benefits package, Jonny shared 3 things that you should do to maximise your impact:
1- Ask yourself why would someone happy in their current role join your Business?
Most engineers are currently in work. As a result, they take a lot of convincing to move jobs. If you approach recruitment without a firm idea of how to answer this question, you’re going to struggle to attract the passive talent on the market. Which will draw out the entire process.
2- Have an open forum or “ideas box” where engineers can anonymously suggest ideas on benefits
Being involved in what the business implement is a key motivator for some engineers. One that often helps improve their job satisfaction and this retention rates. But, not everyone likes to be public with their ideas. So this is a great way to collect new perspectives and pave a strategy to make your business stand out.
3- List the benefits towards the top of the advert
Now that you have done steps 1 and 2, you can start including this in your adverts. You shouldn’t scrimp on the details and we’d recommend adding your benefits at the top. This way you’ll captivate potential engineers sooner and encourage applications.
Summary
In summary, there is a massive opportunity for businesses to stand out by including a comprehensive benefits list. By taking the time to review what the business has to offer not just out-of-work engineers but passive talent, you’ll be able to capitalise on this chance sooner.
Your engineers should be the cornerstone of your assessment. Like with any decision that affects your engineer’s work life. By tapping into their insight and thoughts, you can create a strategy that they will get behind. As a result, you will improve retention and may even be able to implement refer-a-friend schemes to bolster attraction strategies.
What’s next for our Hiring Insights campaigns
This was the final part of our West Midlands Insights. We’re hoping to repeat this campaign and expand to other areas in the UK. In the meantime, we’re going to focus on ways that you can improve your employer brand further and share strategies to help you broadcast this. Including:
- Marketing your jobs,
- How to write Job Adverts for Maintenance Engineer vacancies and more.
However, if you want us to create content on a particular challenge you’re facing, use the form below to let us know. It can be anything, for example, how to enhance your interviewing procedures or techniques to improve the retention of our engineers!
Our team are here to listen, research, analyse and evaluate, so you can focus on your day-to-day duties. If you want to read our other articles, visit our Hiring Insights: Maintenance Engineers in the West Midlands blog.