Public-sector marketers’ pay leapfrogs the private sector – our view

Taking a look through Marketing Magazine’s publication dated 21st September 2011 (http://bit.ly/uZux3a), I noticed they led out with a story about salaries, reporting Public-sector marketers’ are now paid more than private sector employees. They quote from a recent survey carried out by the CIM which took a cross section of people from Consultancy, Manufacturing, Private, Public and Voluntary sectors. Breaking them down by career levels from Head of function, Senior Manager, Middle Manager and Junior Manager.

The thing which troubled me about this was the salaries they quoted appear to be quite substantially out of step with those I’ve experienced in my last 6 years recruiting marketing personnel.

For example; they quoted salaries between £55,000 to £57,802 as an average for a Head of function. However, in reality this is between £5,000 to £20,000 short of the actual range I would expect to see (dependant of if it were a start up or blue-chip), and they appeared to fail to take into account the values of the overall packages, such as car allowances (which can be taken as cash) and bonuses which can vary wildly between 10-40% of base salary therefore adding a significant amount to the overall value.

There was also comments made to the disparity of salary between the sexes, quoting differences between Marketing Director’s salaries growing from 2.8% in 2005, to now 16.3% between men and women. In all my time in recruitment, with the vast range of employers I’ve worked with, I’ve never once experienced a disparity of pay between the sexes. People are paid what they are worth and representative to the value they can bring to a company, coupled with how shrewd a negotiator they are when it comes to the offer stage. Typically, in my experience men appear more inclined to play hardball much more than women, and this might be where this potential disparity arises.

One such example I recently came across saw a candidate I was working with successfully negotiate a base salary offer from £86,000 to £100,000. But the candidate’s success in delivering this wasn’t down to being bullish or stubborn, as that will simply alienated you from your new potential employer. In this instance it was just a well managed negotiation process between the candidate, consultant and end employer. The candidate pressed all the right buttons and saw the employer re-evaluate their worth in a positive light. Naturally this can be very hard to do and dependant on the market and the skills area you find yourself in can certainly be tricky to be successful with. But if you are shrewd, you will know how to deliver this in a way which keeps communication open and doesn’t have the door slammed in your face for appearing ‘greedy’.

Salary Surveys

Equally when it comes to employers, I believe there is a real danger if they rely on generalist or a too broadly conducted salary survey as a guide to helping them set remuneration grades. They should not just rely on the services of a management consultancy alone to deliver this, take advantage of your recruitment consultancies who specialise in these fields and see what they know.

If you have an experienced recruiter on your PSL (preferred supplier list) who you trust and who is able to clearly demonstrate a solid depth of knowledge and experience about the market for talent your company is competing in, why not take advantage of their knowledge? Any recruitment consultant worth their salt should be more use to you than just putting bums on seats, they should be able to act like a real consultant to your company.

If you are undertaking a survey soon, try to take into account some additional parameters when benchmarking your salaries, just to make sure you get a true market view, things like:

- The availability of talent in that specific area – e.g. if you want a really strong web analyst, you have to understand this is a hugely skills short industry space and talented people are hotly contested by potential employers, so salaries are over inflated, at the moment, but will likely change in years to come.

- Don’t just take a general survey; make it specific to who your key talent competitors are. For example, if you’re a telecoms firm based in Berkshire, benchmark yourself not only against other industry players. Look at where your staff have come from historically. For Marketing personnel it’s likely to be other subscriptions based businesses such as financial services, utilities, software companies and some tech firms. Look at the companies who are realistically commutable from West London / Berkshire / Bucks / West Home Counties. As these are going to be the locations candidates are likely to be based from and they will definitely look further than their doorstep for new employers. So you need to know you can compete and your offering is a compelling and attractive one

- You need to take into account the importance of the role to your firm too, and how your firm compares to its wider market competition and what ambitions you have for the future. For example:

• If it’s a role leading a sizable team of highly skilled people, controlling a product of service area that represents hundreds of millions of pounds of revenue to your firm and you’re the market leader, you’re going to be looking for suitable heavyweight who can bring a solid proven background of delivery. Hence it means remunerating accordingly.
• Or are you a firm who are a challenger brand, looking to drive major innovation to gain significant market share. You’re going to need someone who’s got real drive and vigour about them – again this typically comes with a price, but you can also attract a high flyer who’s out to prove themselves. You may be able to secure them initially, but if you’re bandings don’t allow for growth, retention is going to be your next challenge
• Is it a turnaround role? Are there honestly major issues which this hire is looking to solve? If you need a heavy hitter, you need to be in a position to pay the salaries a heavy hitter will typically attract.
• Alternatively it could be you’re just looking for someone to help you get started, a solid performer with some good experience, but they don’t need to be a ‘rock star’, just someone who knows the ropes and can get you on track. This will be a different story.

Getting it wrong

As an example of getting it wrong, at the beginning of the year one such blue-chip hired the services of a consultancy to undertake a detailed independent salary benchmarking project. This helped them re-align their pay scales for the year as they were planning some big hires.

Unfortunately it seems the consultancy who delivered this project did a survey which was too broad, it didn’t take into account the finer points of splitting the bandings by functional teams – i.e. Marketing, Finance, HR, etc. and it just delivered salary bandings graded by seniority which ended up being too narrow. If you were a Senior Manager in HR, you would be on the same salary grade as a Senior Manager Engineer and a Senior Manager Marketer.

Not having the appropriate flexibility in bandings meant when it came to the hiring, they found they couldn’t attract candidates from the talent pools they had historically targeted, their competitors. As such they had two choices arise; start to entertain candidates with lesser experience with the potential to develop into the roles, or change their focus to other sectors they hadn’t seen as relevant before.

This change in mind-set was hard for hiring managers to deal with, they wanted their agencies to keep targeting their competitors for talent, but they simply couldn’t match appropriately skilled and experienced candidates existing packages, so the vacancies unfortunately took a much longer time to successfully deliver to.

One such example would be a Head of CRM position, team management of over 50 people, responsible for a multi-billion pound revenue target and a marketing budget in the hundreds of millions, salaried at just £100k plus package taking the total potential value to circa £150k. Suitable candidates were identified with appropriate skills and experience; however all were remunerated well in excess of this base salary and over all package value.

The danger of getting it wrong is you end up having to negotiate on the profile of the candidate you want, and so you may end up having to settle on second best. But when you’re No1 in your respective market and a FTSE top 30 employer, would you want to take a risk and knowingly set out to hire under experienced people just because you’ve set your salary benchmarks too low?

It’s not just about the money

Of course, I’m not saying the only way to compete is on money alone, but typically the most talented are also the most heavily fought over, so the money typically follows. However I know of many ‘burn and churn’ environments where the employer offers big pay cheques. But there comes a point where people turn their backs on the cash and prioritise job satisfaction as No1.

So there is another way of driving your costs down, offer something truly compelling and get your company known for providing job satisfaction through employee engagement. This will attract a different type of audience, one who does it for enjoyment; you can’t put a price on looking forward to going to work. This doesn’t mean being too laid back and not ambitious as enjoyment comes in many forms, just look at some of the dot.coms, high achieving environments, giving large, influential projects to their employees at all levels, this makes them feel engaged and in turn drives longevity of tenure.

To help drive innovation and engagement, some of the more ground breaking firms have introduced a 20% rule. What this means is, for 20% of your working week you can spend it on something that interests them personally but is company related. Google is one of the biggest names who employ this and it also works like a process of natural selection. Typically with this time, employees will be working on new ideas and innovations, new potential ventures for Google to invest in. Once you have an idea, you take it into development. With very little money or investment from the firm, these ideas gain recognition and momentum by peer recognition. You essentially get colleagues to give you their 20%, join your project and the idea snowballs into development. If the idea doesn’t have merit, you won’t get anyone else’s time, hence work stops. But it’s through initiatives like this Google has remained so innovative with its proposition portfolio, and one of the key reasons why their employee engagement and retention is so high.

Colin Doree – Principal Consultant – Marketing