Employers Offer Signing Bonuses to Lure Blue-Collar Workers
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Here's your Money Briefing for Thursday, July 1st. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. They say money talks. Many business owners who are desperate to attract people back into the workforce have a message for prospective employees. Join our team and we'll pay you a signing bonus, in some cases, thousands of dollars.
Especially if you're younger or you've been a low wage worker, like these are very useful for paying the bills, paying car payments, paying your rent.
So how much money are we talking about? And where do things go from here? Coming up, I'll ask our careers reporter, Patrick Thomas. That's after the break.
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When you hear about signing bonuses, you probably think of professional athletes or corporate executives. But a lot of employers these days are struggling to fill positions, and they're offering signing and retention bonuses to many blue collar workers. Our careers reporter Patrick Thomas has been following this trend, and he joins me now to talk about it. Patrick, thanks for being with us.
Thanks so much for having me.
So Patrick, how big a bonus are we talking about that businesses are offering?
Well, it's really all over the place. I mean, we've seen as low as $100 in fields and some service roles and $250. We've seen even $30,000 in fields such as nursing or dental. We've seen truck drivers with $5,000 to $10,000 bonuses. fast food places. A Burger King in Pennsylvania is offering $1,500. It really runs the map all over the place to tens of thousands of dollars to even a couple hundred dollars in some locations. And it just, it really depends on the business and how much they're willing to fork out to get workers.
And is this competition for workers changing what a typical help wanted ad looks like?
I spoke with the folks at the job search site, ZipRecruiter, and they told me that nearly 20% of all jobs being posted this month on their site right now are offering a signing bonus compared to only about 2% in March. One of their labor economists said, this is without a doubt the biggest change I've ever seen in mentions of a particular work perk. So that just gives you a sense of of how crazy this is and kind of unprecedented in a way to see this perk being offered so broadly across so many states.
Now, you've talked to a lot of business owners. So what are they telling you about how they're feeling about this cutthroat competition for workers?
They're definitely sweating it out. Especially in places like the service industry where you're seeing restaurants all over the place not being able to be open on Monday or can't open for lunch yet. Just trying to get employees to be open for brunch hours or if you're a bar, stay open until 3 or 4 a.m. keep patrons there. Sometimes they just don't have the staff for it. So it's pretty desperate out there and that's why we're seeing a lot of these $1,500, $2,000, $3,000 bonuses because it is pretty crazy out there and employers really need people.
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