Most hiring managers think the salaries they offer are about right. Far fewer think they’re exactly right.
Robert Half, a global recruitment firm that places contract and permanent staff, surveyed 250 New Zealand hiring managers in finance, accounting, and IT and technology. 88% said their pay was at least moderately aligned with the skills and experience their roles require. Only 38% called it fully aligned.
Another 38% described their pay as mostly aligned, and 12% as moderately aligned. 11% said there was some alignment but salaries were generally lower than expected, and 1% said pay was significantly below what the skills and experience warrant.
The survey links that alignment to hiring results. Among managers whose pay was at least moderately aligned, 59% said getting it right had significantly improved their ability to secure preferred candidates.
An independent research company ran the survey online in October 2025. Robert Half has released results from it through 2026, including earlier findings on pay for AI skills and salary secrecy.
What getting it right is worth
A further 30% of the aligned group said alignment had helped somewhat, though they still faced challenges in a competitive hiring environment.
10% said it had made little difference to their recruitment results. They pointed to flexibility, company culture or career progression as bigger factors in candidates’ decisions. Just 1% said they’d noticed no impact at all.
The 12% who said their pay was only slightly or not at all aligned are a small group, about 30 of the 250 respondents. Of those, 21% said the misalignment had hurt their ability to hire the people they wanted. Most, 69%, said it had made little difference, and 10% hadn’t noticed an impact.
“Salary may not be the only factor shaping a candidate’s decision, but it establishes the foundation for how they perceive the value of a role,” says Ronil Singh, a director at Robert Half.
Singh says flexibility, culture and career development are powerful ways to stand out, but they work best when a competitive salary backs them up. When pay reflects skills, expertise and how complex a role is, he says, employers are in a far stronger position to attract and secure top talent.
What the national wage figures show
Stats NZ’s labour cost index for all salary and wage rates rose 2.0% in the year to June 2026. Private sector rates rose 2.0% and public sector rates 1.7%.
Prices rose faster. Annual consumers price index inflation was 4.1% in the year to June 2026. Stats NZ often sets the labour cost index against it to show how wage growth compares with price rises.
Average ordinary time hourly earnings, a separate measure from Stats NZ’s Quarterly Employment Survey, rose 2.8% to $44.62 over the same year.
More people were also looking for work. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 5.6% in the June 2026 quarter, up from 5.4% in March, and 171,000 people were unemployed, up from 164,000. The underutilisation rate rose from 12.9% to 13.8%, while the employment rate held at 66.7%.
The picture differs by island. Unemployment was 3.7% in the South Island in the June 2026 quarter, against 6.0% in the North Island. Those island figures aren’t seasonally adjusted.
Benchmarking came up in Robert Half’s earlier findings too. A July 2026 release from the same survey asked organisations that had adopted AI in some form about paying AI-proficient candidates, and 23% named a lack of internal salary benchmarks as their single biggest challenge.
Singh says leading organisations take a proactive, data-driven approach to salary benchmarking. In a cautious hiring market, he says, continually recalibrating pay to reflect changing skill demands is essential to keeping recruitment moving.
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