Earlier this year, a client in the Fleet sector came to us looking for an Account Director. They wanted someone with strong fleet experience, a decent track record managing big corporate accounts at C level and the commercial experience and ability to grow them. A fairly normal wish list.
Apart from the salary - it was just not in line with what we're seeing in the market at the moment.
We could have taken the brief from them and gone out to market hoping we'd find someone. But we already knew what was likely to happen. The people who ticked all those boxes were earning more elsewhere so all we'd be doing was proving that point -so we got everyone on a call to talk through what we believed were the sticking points.
We showed them what we were seeing across fleet and allied areas of automotive, what comparable people were earning and what they could realistically expect for the salary they had available. Which wasn't quite what they'd had in mind. Sometimes the person you've described and the salary you've got simply don't match.
There's only really two ways to go at this point - either broaden out the search or up the commercials (to be fair, you can also hunt for the needle in a haystack but that's not really a strategy).
So we opened the search up slightly and looked at people who had the sector and account management experience they needed, but not necessarily the previous experience at C level.
They hired one of them and they are absolutely flying.
This happens more often than you might think. It's not necessarily that a hiring manager has got the salary "wrong". The market moves, roles evolve and when you start combining several different requirements into one job, the salary expectations can quickly creep up.
But if there is a gap between the brief and the budget, I'd much rather have that conversation at the start. Sometimes you need to move the salary. Sometimes you need to move the brief. What you don't want to do is spend six weeks looking for someone who was never there in the first place!
If you're hiring in automotive or fleet and want a straight answer on what the market looks like, get in touch with me!