Staff Shortages Especially Hard on SMBs

September 20, 2007 on 5:22 am | In Uncategorized |

Posted by Ann All on September 13, 2007 at 3:46 pm

In today’s tight labor market, finding skilled employees must be especially tough for big companies since they have lots of positions to fill, right?

Several experts interviewed in a Seattle Post-Intelligencer story say staffing shortages actually hit SMBs especially hard because they often lack the resources to match the salaries and other employment incentives offered by their larger competitors.

“It has a lot to do with what they can afford. They have less revenue. They don’t have as much to work with. They can’t put together a benefits package,” says the president of a human resources company.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, private businesses overall with fewer than 49 employees paid an average hourly wage of $16.18, $7.32 less than the average hourly wage of $23.50 at companies with more than 500 employees. And businesses with more than 100 employees are more than twice as likely as SMBs to offer retirement benefits.

One expert in the article says that SMBs can counter this effect by offering non-monetary perks such as flextime. High-tech companies, including giants such as Google and Microsoft, offer a bevy of unusual benefits, ranging from free transportation to gourmet food.

 Comments :

BPO can easily solve this problem due to the fact that IT specialists in outsourced countries are cheaper and readily available through various working schemes. SMBs in the US can easily rely on various providers, including the ones from Ukraine with highly skilled IT and admin workforce in English available at a time zone EST+07, so that your employees can start interacting with outsourced IT providers starting 8am until 12am EST, which is normally enough time for specification definition or issue conference calls/video calls.