Best-in-class companies are changing in order to adapt to today’s talent landscape, according to Adecco’s “Best-in-Class Workforce Management Insights” report released today.

“Overall, when employers take care of certain, often basic, employee needs, it leads to success and satisfaction,” wrote Joyce Russell, president, Adecco USA. “On the other hand, many companies are taking vastly different approaches — even contradictory, in some cases — to how they develop happy, engaged and productive workforces.”

The report found today’s top companies take the following measures to ensure talent will be happy:

• They hire candidates who have the right hard and soft skills.
• They weigh a potential candidate’s happiness as early as the interviewing phase.
• They believe a candidate’s prior experience, hard and soft skills, and cultural fit are important to their potential happiness within an organization.
• They believe a candidate’s education to be of lower importance to their potential happiness within an organization than their skills and cultural fit.

It also found 82% of executives from best-in-class companies believe wages are one of the most important factors for employees; that compares with 73% for average companies and 79% for laggard companies. Furthermore, more than half of all companies think minimum wage should be raised.

Other highlights from the Best-in-Class Workforce Management Insights survey include:

• Skills: 56% of the C-suite believes the “skills gap” is real. However, that’s down 24 percentage points from last year, when 80% of all company leaders said the skills gap was real.
• Benefits: 60% of employers offer health insurance and 401(k) packages to salaried employees, but 40% now also offer “softer” benefits like work-life balance.
• Mentorships: Only 43% of employers are offering education courses to their employees, but 61% believe mentorships are important in determining employee happiness.
• Succession plans: 66% of employers have succession plans in place or are creating them.

Adecco identified best-in-class firms based on criteria including new hire time to productivity, the length of time the company would like the employees to work there, the length of time the employees actually work within the company, and the amount the company is compensating their employees in comparison to market value. Adecco, With Aberdeen Group, surveyed more than 500 C-suite executives; with the Levo Institute, Adecco surveyed 1,100 millennial workers.