Gallup tracks across thousands of organizations globally using their engagement survey, the Q12®, which measures employees’ perspectives on the most crucial elements of their workplace culture.
Some results from the survey suggesting that Employee engagement within the UK is at an all-time low.
Gallup Q12 Annual Employee Engagement survey 2022
U.S. 34.1% Engaged Employees
GLOBAL 23% Engaged Employees
UK 10.23% Engaged Employees
BEST-PRACTICE ORGANIZATIONS 70% Engaged Employees
Like anything, these stats have to be taken into context. The variation of the data pool from the U.S. (139,238) compared to the UK (1,280) doesn’t help and we don’t have knowledge regarding the job functions, demographics, industry sector or size of company that the poll represents.
Obviously, these figures are also representative of the early stages of the post Covid back to work era.
Rightly, many shall look to understand how we can improve employee engagement thus people / company performance and employee retention. Conversely, these figures are also insightful from a recruitment perspective.
Relating the figures back to the recruitment sector
So to help relate the survey back to the recruitment sector, please see below the additional statistics and categories from the survey.
- UK Engaged Employees: 10.23%
- UK Not-Engaged Employees: 76.13%
- UK Dis-Engaged Employees: 64%
From a recruitment perspective, the category titles would be viewed as the following;
- UK Engaged Employees – These would be categorised as Sub-Passive Candidates
- UK Not-Engaged Employees – These individuals would be Passive Candidates who may be open to consider their career options and have a conversation.
- UK Dis-Engaged Employees – This category of candidate would be deemed Active or ‘Open to work’ on the recruitment market.
Traditional 80/20 recruitment viewpoint
Over the years, the recruitment sector utilising other surveys has suggested that 20% of individuals are applying to job adverts (‘Active / Open to work’), 60% of people are Passive and 20% of people Sub-Passive.
This would correlate with a search I did this morning on LinkedIn sales professionals – 20.8% of people are Open to Work (Open to consider their options). This percentage would also show the additional number of people currently out of work.
Does this change your tactics when it comes to recruiting?
Utilising the historical 20/60/20 talent pool viewpoint, a typical recruitment agent or company advertising their role directly would only target Open to work candidates (Disengaged employees and out of work people) – c. 20% of the talent pool.
The typical Headhunter or Search firm would also do the above, but in addition would open their search and investment to contact the so-called Passive individuals (60%) to attract and engage more potential suitable candidates for a given position equating to a total of 80% of the talent pool.
Either utilising the results from the Gallup survey (89.77%) or historical stats (80%) would indicate that a Search or Headhunt approach could provide a significant larger candidate pool.
Conversely, if you’re an employer you may be better off advertising directly as opposed to utilising a contingent recruitment agency whose investment is primarily focused on the ‘Active’ candidate pool and gaining advert response to turn them CV’s over to the recruiting company. In short, they’re not doing anything more than what you could do yourself…
These stats are useful and in the recruitment world it is clear that there is a competitive advantage to operate within the largest pool of candidates who would be regarded as Passive Individuals or from an employee engagement perspective – Not-Engaged Employees.
This is an area where it is more crucial than ever to understand individual motivations and unlock employee engagement.