A buyers market

There are far more jobs out there globally than there are people looking for them and, as a result, the market has become much more “search-driven”.

“Employers are having to adapt away from the kind of thinking that is ‘I have a vacancy, please let me have five CVs by Tuesday and we will tell you who we want to interview.’The answer to that is, you’ll be lucky – that is the way the market has gone. And, of course, in the classic scenario where supply falls short of demand, then prices go up – there is upward pressure on salaries and there is also a natural increase factor which is caused by retention issues, as well.”

Mr Parry, whose company runs the website www.shippingjobs.com,says that because people have to search hard in order to recruit staff, they are also trying to avoid the need to recruit – by making sure they retain their staff more effectively than they used to.And that,he says,is not just about increasing salaries.

“Retention strategies are very much being driven by an increase in both ports and shipping of professional human resource competence. Lots of HR managers are being brought into the industry from the outside and they are often horrified by what they find in terms of HR practices, salaries and packages.

“It is not just that the packages are a bit behind, but the information available to them on salaries and packages is lacking. Often they have come from an industry where all this information was at their fingertips.Ports are a little bit better than shipowners in this regard, but it is still not fabulous. “We have been inundated over the past couple of years with requests for salaries reports and benchmarking studies – evidence that this information is very much needed and lacking.”

The ports industry is increasingly competing with other industries – from mining to engineering – for its staff. “Globalisations, conglomerations, consolidation – things are getting bigger and starting to look like each other and that does mean there are a lot of transferable skills across group types,” says Mr Parry. “A port group owns land and runs terminals; well so does a mining group or an oil company. On the engineering side, some of the renewable energy markets are demanding similar skills sets – and this sector is heading for massive growth.” The first piece of advice, says Mr Parry, is to take recruitment seriously, and get on with the process efficiently.

That means commitment to getting the salary-tojob specifications ratio right, and commitment to the actual recruitment process – in a candidate-driven market, there is nothing more likely to frustrate and lose good candidates than a process that is slow and lacking in feedback and common courtesy.Would-be employers simply have to be “nice”to people!

“People are not scrabbling around for opportunities. They need to be treated with old-fashioned customer service. Very often an employer will think a certain employee is important for them but it will sit in their tray for two weeks – by which time the candidate has gone somewhere else or just got fed up and won’t want to work for a company like that anyway.”

A fair pay package is perhaps an obvious one, but ports also need to be realistic on whether what they are asking for actually exists, says Mr Parry. And bear in mind that top achievers probably aren’t looking at the job advertisements – they need to be found. “It is not only finding good people – it is motivating them with good opportunities.Why would I move from one port group to another? The employer has to be willing to sell themselves.

“You don’t necessarily have to pay over the market rate but you have to offer something that is missing from the candidate’s life – it might be about career
structure, it might be about training.Of all the reasons
why people leave jobs, money is only one of them and
it isn’t by any means the most important.”