Your Salary Budget Tells What Role You're Actually Hiring For

Two of our values at The Safe Step are Trust and Be Open. In practice, that means telling clients what they need to hear, not just what they want to hear, especially when it comes to money.  I had a call recently with a business looking for a standalone HSE manager. The top of their budget was ~$130k base. They'd already tried to fill the role twice. 

I had to tell them the truth: for that money, they weren't going to get an experienced HSE manager. They were going to get a business partner. If they wanted a manager running the function on their own, they had to add at least $30K to their base salary. 

It's not the first time I've had this conversation, and it won't be the last. Another client came to me the same week wanting a standalone advisor covering multiple sites, at $25k below the market rate.

I don’t think clients are being unreasonable, but there is a gap between the job title on the brief and the job title the market attaches to that salary. When the two don't line up, the role sits vacant, gets re-run, and eventually lands on a recruiter's desk with a "we've tried everything" story attached. 

The real cost of getting it wrong 

One client had someone in an advisor role who asked for a pay rise. The company said no, and the person left. The role has now been vacant through two internal recruitment attempts, and the client is about to pay an agency fee on top of whatever they'll eventually need to offer to fill it. By the time you add up the vacancy, the lost productivity, and the fee, it would have been cheaper to pay the rise. 

I understand why budgets get set the way they do. Sometimes there's a legacy number from whoever was in the role five years ago. Sometimes not-for-profit clients point to salary sacrificing or a higher super rate and expect that to close the gap. But often it doesn’t. They're weighing up what they can earn doing the same job somewhere else. They want cash in their pocket today, not super in 20 years’ time. 

What I tell clients instead 

When a budget doesn't match the brief, I say so early. I'd rather have that conversation upfront than take a retainer I know I can't deliver against. If a client can work with realistic numbers, I'll work hard for them and find them a great person. If the number and the brief don't match, I'll tell them what they can get for that money, and let them decide from there. 

I work with clients who treat the salary conversation as part of the brief, not an afterthought. The ones that ask what the market is doing before they set the number, not after the role has been vacant for three months. That’s the value that an experienced recruitment consultant can bring – long before the role has been sitting vacant for two rounds of recruitment.