The saying that ‘money isn’t everything’ is true.
If you’ve found an ideal candidate for a position within your dealership and want to do everything you can to entice them to take the position, but you only have a limited budget to work with, don’t despair! There are other things you can do to ‘sweeten the deal’ that don’t necessarily involve offering a higher salary.
Here’s some food for thought about other ways to negotiate to secure the best candidate.
Working hours
If your budget only allows you to commit a certain figure to a position, offering the option of a slightly lower salary in return for a fortnightly or monthly rostered day off can be a highly appealing proposition.
Even if you’re unable to accommodate providing a regular full day off, you could also consider offering flexible working hours. While it may not always be possible in service-facing roles, allowing employees to accumulate ‘flex time’ whenever they start work early or stay back late which they can use as time off at a later date can be extremely valuable for many workers.
For administrative or office-based roles, you could also consider offering the option to work from home one or two days a week if it works for the dealership operationally.
Holiday and other leave
There’s really no reason why you need to adhere to only offering the standard four weeks of annual leave. Offering employees additional annual leave or even the option to purchase extra annual leave is a technique used by plenty of employers to make working for the company more appealing, without increasing your upfront financial commitments.
It doesn’t stop at annual leave either; you can also consider offering additional sick leave, family leave, carers leave or compassionate/bereavement leave, or even time off to complete charitable or community work.
Allowances or benefits
Employees need to dedicate a hefty amount of their take-home salary to cover a wide range of expenses; offering to reduce or remove some of those expenses is another thing you can negotiate on.
Providing benefits such as a company car, phone, laptop, travel expenses, uniform reimbursement or a gym membership can be a great way to provide more value with your offer of employment. If an employee would need to relocate to accept the role, offering to cover their relocation costs or providing a housing subsidy would also be of significant value.
Another option you can consider is offering salary sacrificing or salary packaging. Under this arrangement, the employee agrees to forgo part of their future entitlement to pre-tax salary or wages in return for you as the employer providing a benefit of similar value, such as a car, phone, health insurance, child care fees, uniform or superannuation.
Performance-related or time-served bonuses
You can also consider tying salary increases or bonuses to performance or length of service to minimise your initial financial commitments.
Performance-related bonuses can be a great way to incentivise and reward employees for working to their full potential. Ultimately, if the employee meets or exceeds the agreed targets, they should be generating sufficient value for the company to justify a higher rate of pay.
Similarly, if you’re struggling with staff retention issues, specifying salary increases or bonuses the employee will receive as they reach various length-of-service milestones can be a great way to help you retain employees and reward loyalty.
Severance package
In a volatile economy, job security means a lot.
While you may not be able to guarantee an employee that their job will still be there in a couple of years, guaranteeing that you will provide them with a certain amount of severance pay should their role be discontinued due to no fault of their own can be an excellent source of reassurance.
Professional development opportunities
Very few employees want to stay in a single role for the entirety of their career, so offering to cover the cost of additional training or professional development courses can be a great perk that not only benefits the employee, but also the dealership.
You’ll be demonstrating to the employee that you value their contribution and think they’re worth investing in, while also helping them to develop new skills and knowledge which they can bring to the business.
Teamrecruit is Australia’s most established recruitment agency specialising in truck, earthmoving and agricultural machinery dealerships in Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. Find out more about Teamrecruit and how we support employers and candidates in the dealership industry.
