Dive Brief:
- More than eight out of 10 U.S. companies find hiring and retaining professional and office workers extremely difficult and a bigger challenge than employing manual service workers, the Conference Board found in a survey.
- Professional and office workers “are now significantly harder to both find and retain than just one year ago,” the Conference Board said Thursday, noting that 84% of companies surveyed “are struggling to find talent” compared with 60% in April 2021. Eight out of 10 (81%) of companies face difficulty hiring manual service workers.
- “Over the last few years we’ve seen headline after headline focus on dwindling supply of manual and trade services workers,” according to Robin Erickson, vice president for human capital at the Conference Board. The survey “reveals that office and professional workers have become a scarcer commodity.”
Dive Insight:
CFOs and their C-suite colleagues, facing the tightest labor market in years, have sought to hire and retain staff by raising pay, expanding benefits and approving remote work for a record proportion of their employees.
Business and government raised employee compensation 4.5% during the first quarter compared with the same period in 2021, a higher increase than the 4% annual growth during the fourth quarter, the Labor Department said on April 29. Meanwhile, the cost of benefits rose 1.8% during the first quarter, faster than any quarter since 2004.
Demand for workers far outstrips supply. Organizations reported 11.3 million job openings in February but only 6.3 million Americans sought work, the Labor Department said.