Michael Wood, Director, Education & Workforce
The COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated the pace of change in the workplace. Day-to-day operations and even recruiting processes have moved online, and workforce needs are continually evolving. Understanding the current trends – much less what to do about them – can be a challenge for employers.
Dallas-based workforce solutions company BGSF hopes its inaugural Salary Guide will help companies and job seekers navigate an uncertain labor market.
BGSF, formerly known as BG Staffing, is a family of highly specialized staffing firms that provide recruiting, consulting, and management services in the professional, real estate, and light industrial sectors. Headquartered in the Dallas Region, the company works in 44 states and 89 separate offices. Across its footprint, BGSF places more than 30,000 job seekers and serves more than 9,000 clients annually.
The 2021 Salary Guide is specific to BGSF’s professional portfolio, which includes IT, cybersecurity, financial services, human resources, and marketing. While BGSF has always provided salary and recruitment best practices to its clients, the new guide marks the company’s first effort to package and promote the information for public consumption.
Despite its name, the 2021 Salary Guide goes beyond compensation recommendations. The publication also highlights hiring trends and offers tips for remote recruiting as well as a preview of the BGSF hiring process.
“We wanted the salary guide to showcase to our clients and prospective clients that BGSF can be a trusted advisor and one-stop-shop for all their workforce solutions needs,” said Stuart Sides, Senior Vice President of Strategic Customers for BGSF.
Job seekers may benefit from the guide, too. By setting a standard for compensation, candidates for the laundry-list of titles included in the guide can better assess their worth as they hunt for their next role. BGSF hopes this transparency will help move the needle on pay equity, providing candidates an opportunity to check that they are being compensated fairly.
The guide can also serve as a resource for employers working to build out entirely new teams. Amid the pandemic, for example, some employers have hired cybersecurity professionals to ensure company and employee safety while working remotely. For many, this is unfamiliar territory, and hiring managers may be unsure where to start or what positions are needed. In those cases, BGSF’s Salary Guide may be a useful tool in developing a hierarchical structure for a department.
Yet to BGSF, the biggest asset of the guide is that it is real.
“The jobs and salaries listed in the guide aren’t just a compilation of research and data,” said Sides. “They reflect what we are seeing on the ground with candidates we successfully place.”
Developing the publication was no small task, requiring months of work to pull together the data from BGSF’s various staffing firms. The bulk of that time was spent validating the data with clients and jobseekers to ensure the salary figures were fresh and reflective of the current job market.
“The whole world has changed, including the workforce,” said Emily Burroughs, Vice President of Marketing for BGSF. “Customers and talent are looking for answers, which is what necessitated our production of this guide as a resource for those struggling to keep up with the rapidly evolving trends in the job market.”
The 2021 BGSF Salary Guide is available for free.