Employers who excel at talent recruitment have a real edge when it comes to competing for talent in an ever tightening labor market. 

Savvy employers with a best-in-class and/or competitive benefits package strategically use their benefits program as an invaluable tool to seal the deal with candidates they really want to bring on board. Unique, memorable, demographically-relevant, and out-of-the-box benefits can also help an employer stand out amongst the crowd.

While leaning on your benefits program to help with recruiting is always a wise hiring strategy, when in the hiring process you bring it up should be somewhat calculated. Here are a few tips employers and hiring managers might choose to consider when discussing benefits during the hiring process.

For candidates you really want to hire, there's typically nothing wrong with discussing benefits right out of the gate. This assumes, of course, that you are comfortable with each candidate's assessment of you, the employer as the right place for them; interviewing should be a two-way street after all.

That said, in most recruiting situations there typically isn't one specific person or ideal candidate in mind to fill a slot. Instead, most employers recruit to attract as many qualified candidates as possible. In this instance, you'll want to entice candidates with a competitive benefits package in your job posting, but you don't want to be too explicit for two primary reasons.

We all have Cal Ripken-like employees in our offices - the ones who pride themselves on never missing a day of work. They are the ones who come in when the snow drifts are two feet high, when the highway is washed out due to a hundred year flood, or when they are on the cusp of falling over due to a cough and fever that would most likely kill the more feeble in our population.

And while we love that these attendance superstars overcome most of these obstacles, it’s the last one which should be of the most concern when caring for the overall health of your workforce. 

For employers, managing employees’ sick time is a challenge and even struggle. Some employees take sick time when they really shouldn’t, while others don’t take time when they ought to for the good of themselves and their fellow workers. The latter is especially harmful, as one person’s communicable disease can quickly spread to others. A study in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that working sick costs employers across the nation a cumulative $160 billion in lost productivity each year.

The following are some clear guidelines on when employees should and shouldn't take sick time, along with how employers can communicate the guidelines for the benefit of the entire workforce.

The past year’s tight labor market has made finding new hires more challenging than usual for employers, and it looks like the trend will continue throughout much of 2019. In order to attract and retain qualified talent, employers aren’t merely offering competitive salaries; they’re also revising their benefits packages, which many employees heavily scrutinize when entertaining job offers. As we enter 2019, here are some of the employee benefits trends that will shape overall compensation in the coming year.

Health insurance remains the most trying employee benefit for employers to manage (and not only because many are required to offer it). Health insurance has always required a balancing act between giving employees valuable coverage and managing company costs.

In 2019, employers are approaching this balancing act by promoting convenient and high-level service while mitigating the costs associated with major claims (the top 1 percent of which use more resources than the bottom 75 percent of policyholders). Employers are accomplishing this via five methods:

Earlier this week, the IRS announced a reprieve to nonprofit organizations with regards to taxing fringe benefits. This comes as good news to those nonprofits concerned about the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which President Trump signed into law in December of last year.

Due to overwhelming pressure placed on top Republican leaders from nonprofit organizations, as well as opposition from the Senate, requests were made to the Treasury Department to delay the implementation of the tax until 2019.

While the reprieve is specific to the 2018 tax year; it will remain in place until such time as when Congress changes the law.

The reprieve offers a financial break to nonprofit organizations specific to calculating the cost of their qualified transportation and commuting benefits. This financial break also extends to penalties that would otherwise be assessed in the event of under-calculating these expenses.