You’ve got an idea. You’ve proven the concept. You just secured a round of funding to get your idea off the ground. The next step is to take that idea, that proof of concept, and funding or not, scale the business and build your dream. However, where do you start when you’re building a team? What do you look for? How do you create a package that will attract talent and, most importantly, have you offered a package that will keep the team you built?
Granted the job market is a little more open when compared to before COVID as companies look to rehire or backfill positions. I know the Rocky Mountain region and Denver, in particular, is a very sought-after market for talent. You have the tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook with already established offices in Colorado. Additionally, there are countless foreign companies expanding their base of U.S. operations out of Denver. In other cases, even companies like Palantir are moving their Silicon Valley base of operations to the Mile High City. All this adds to the contraction of available talent.
This leads me to our topic of conversation: How do you build a compensation package that not only offers competitive pay, but in today’s world (more and more studies support this) a robust benefits package? According to a recent Harris Poll, 85% of individuals would choose a company that paid them less, but offered a strong benefits package compared to a company that offered 20% higher pay and no benefits.* Again, it’s no secret that in order to attract and retain top talent you need to have this in place.
By partnering with PPO companies like TriNet, you can immediately turn on a best-in-breed benefit package that rivals that of Google and Amazon. Why is it important? Well, because when individuals are exploring a job change or entering the job market for the first time, they’re attracted to those name brands. A lot of times individuals also want to make their mark in an organization that is growing and where they feel like they’re being heard. However, if the benefits package is not there, it makes hiring that much more challenging.
To be sure, you can achieve a strong benefits package through the open market, it involves a lot of effort, constant benchmarking, and the right partners. Not to mention the timing involved to source various vendors and their potential solutions.
I’m sure you’re asking yourself, how do PPO companies create rich benefit offerings? Well, they are aggregators of services. It simply works by taking a bunch of small and midsize companies and pooling those companies together to create buying power through economies of scale. We then leverage this buying power with our insurance carriers to unlock plans that are unavailable anywhere else in the open market. PPO companies are able to spread the risk across so many lives and are able to protect renewal increases and offer premiums that historically save both the employer and the employee money. Medical insurance is often one of the largest line items an organization budgets for and you can imagine what that might look like for a five-person company up to a 300-person company.
By offering world-class health insurance (i.e. access to dental, vision, life, accidental death, short-term and long-term disability insurance, or supplemental insurances, etc.) you start to build out a benefits package that serves as an attraction tool as much as it does a retention one.
Scaling is certainly one of the most important paths along the lifecycle journey of any company, especially for startups because it can happen so rapidly with an injection of funding. With the right benefits package in place, you can attract talent in a very competitive market and retain that talent you fought so hard for in the first place.
Winning the war on talent means you’re in a better position to compete in today’s competitive environment.
