A word from our founder: Looking at recruitment and retention trends in 2024

I spoke recently about the challenges that businesses are now facing when it comes to attracting and keeping hold of top talent.

This is a tough landscape for businesses.

Since the Covid pandemic and the rise of flexible working, we’ve seen a growing number of employees leave their jobs. We’ve also seen an ongoing struggle for businesses to fill their job openings with suitable candidates.

All the while, the media is churning out new terms to label the status quos. So, we’re able to follow ongoing disaster trends like ‘The Great Resignation’, ‘The UK’s skills gap’, and ‘Quiet quitting’.

To learn more about the state of play for businesses in 2024, we recently carried out a global survey. This allowed us to gather results from across five different countries – Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the UK.

And from our UK findings, we were able to see the biggest concerns of UK businesses and what they were hoping to achieve this year.

Our business owners said rising costs were their biggest concern for 2024 – as voted by 87.6% of participants.

Our findings also revealed that almost half of UK business owners have been making payouts in a bid to retain their staff. In fact, pay rises, flexible working, and mental health support all came up as popular retention hooks.

And as for goals, survival seems to be a key one. This only goes to show the difficulties and increasing pressure that businesses are having to deal with right now. Because while growth should always stay high on the agenda, it seems staying afloat is the priority for most.

Not to forget that these difficulties also fall onto staff, who are having to manage rising living costs at a time when pay rises may be few and far between.

It seems that cementing the skills gap will also be a big focus for many this year. We saw 51.8% of people say they were investing in staff training.

We know this may be another hard year for businesses – so this is your reminder that support is available should you ever need it.

As a Peninsula client, you have access to 24-hour advice, legal support, documentation services, and more. And if you’re not a client with us and you need business support, you can still book a free advice call with us.

So, if you have questions or concerns, get in touch to speak to an expert:

• Via our online chatbot

• By tapping below to book a callback.