Three things the Hays Salary Guide is really telling Geelong business leaders

EVERY year the Hays Salary Guide lands and every year most of the commentary is a valuable indicator on what employees want.

The more interesting read is what the data tells us about the decisions businesses need to make right now.

This year’s edition surveyed more than 7,000 professionals across Australia and New Zealand.

Here are the three findings that matter most for Geelong business owners heading into the next financial year.

Firstly, the skills shortage hasn’t gone away, it has just changed shape: 82 per cent of organisations experienced a skills shortage in the past year, up from 79 per cent the year prior.

But the bottleneck has shifted.

Businesses are no longer struggling to find people, they’re finding that the people they have lack the capability to grow with the business.

The gaps employers are flagging are in communication and people management (82 per cent), adaptability to change (73 per cent) and creative thinking.

These aren’t unfilled roles. These are qualities missing from people already in the seat.

For Geelong businesses, this is a prompt to look inward before looking outward.

Where are the capability gaps in your current team? What structured development have you invested in over the past 12 months?

Businesses that treat training as a cost tend to feel this pressure most acutely.

Those that treat it as infrastructure are building something that compounds.

Secondly, AI adoption is running ahead of business strategy.

Sixty per cent of employees are already using AI regularly at work. Only 22 per cent have received any formal training from their employer.

That’s not a small gap. It’s a governance problem hiding in plain sight.

Your team is already using AI tools to get work done, with or without your knowledge and without guardrails.

At the same time, there’s a real productivity opportunity being left on the table by businesses that haven’t made a deliberate decision about how AI fits into their operations. You don’t need an enterprise AI strategy to take a meaningful step here.

Start with a simple question: what tools is your team already using, and what would structured use look like?

Businesses that get ahead of this will be better placed to attract capable people and get more from the ones they already have.

Thirdly, salary benchmarking is no longer optional.

Average salary increases are sitting at around 4 per cent, broadly tracking inflation. But the distribution is uneven.

Retail, hospitality and education are among the sectors most pessimistic about wage growth, and those industries are well represented in Geelong’s economy.

If you haven’t benchmarked your roles against current market rates recently, you’re navigating blind.

The cost cuts both ways: underpay and you quietly lose your best people; overpay without context and you compress your margins unnecessarily.

The Hays data doesn’t paint a picture of crisis. It paints a picture of a moment; one where Geelong businesses paying attention and making deliberate decisions will move ahead of those that aren’t.

To view the full data head to hays.com.au/salary-guide

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