High salary of newcomers leads to internal frustration in the workplace

August 2023

Equality in the remuneration of members of the same team seems to be an inescapable rule for establishing or restoring a calm working climate. Talent shortages continue to prevail in many sectors. Employers often need to dig deep to convince new staff to choose them. To attract talent, companies increasingly tend to inflate entry salaries, when they can afford to do so.
 

As a result, employees who have sometimes been employed for years find out that new colleagues - due to the tight labour market - sometimes earn as much as them. "That causes tensions among employees. Once more senior professionals discover this, they soon feel undervalued, or feel that the employer has betrayed their trust. This dissatisfaction is also understandable, because it is logical that, as a newcomer, you earn less than your colleague with more seniority. The working atmosphere can suffer enormously as a result, and in the worst case, it can even cause more senior employees to resign," warns Olivier Pietrantoni, Tech and Accounting & Finance at recruitment firm Robert Walters


Growth potential

How do employers justify this? When recruiting IT profiles specifically, the obsolescence of technical skills of the oldest employees in the organisation is often put forward. This is a valid reason when a skill is immediately required to carry out a project, but it quickly becomes a dangerous argument to use when your company does not offer any ongoing training to its employees who have been in post for several years.

In addition, many organisations are hiring staff for their growth potential. "For example, employees are already being recruited for the position of system engineer or management controller, even though they may not yet have all the necessary skills and experience to fill this role immediately. Yet they are already getting the salary for a role they still need to grow into.

Finally, the tightness of the candidate market and the shortage of talent necessarily lead to a sharp revision of salaries. In general, it is the company that is quickest in its recruitment process and most generous in its remuneration that succeeds in integrating the best profiles.

But there are solutions. Employers can take certain actions to avoid such tensions in the workplace. Olivier: "Employers can, for example, assess in advance which employees are at risk of feeling unsatisfied because of the salary of new colleagues by having an open and honest conversation with them about this beforehand. This way, they can reward the more senior employees in a different way: by reviewing and comparing their remuneration to the market upstream and by offering other fringe benefits or bonuses but also by funding training for these long-serving employees, to help them regain their employability," shares Olivier Pietrantoni.
 

'Last in, first out'

Keep in mind that organisations that offer huge salaries today are also the ones that will put quite a lot of pressure on these recently recruited employees. Indeed, if the economy contracts or if the company finds itself in financial difficulty, these new arrivals on high salaries will be highly exposed, and sometimes even made redundant prematurely as part of cost-cutting measures, the so-called 'last in, first out' phenomenon.

“Finally, remember that it is often better to just not talk about your salary with colleagues, as this often leads to unnecessary dissatisfied and crooked faces in the workplace" concludes Olivier Pietrantoni. When employees are considering renegotiating their salaries, it is preferable for them to remain focused on the market value of their profile. This is the data that will be needed to obtain a fair review of their remuneration, and it will be the most effective argument for getting the employer to think about it, or risk seeing experienced talent leave!

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