It's time to give white-collar perks to traditionally blue-collar jobs

• The tight labor market has empowered many employees to ask for more from their employers.
• Experts say that offering blue collar workers "white collar" perks is one way out of the crunch.

Throughout the pandemic, businesses have touted perks like sign-on bonuses. Others have raised wages. But experts say that companies should go even further as they reconsider compensation for many crucial blue-collar jobs that are struggling with staffing.

Mathieu Stevenson, CEO of hourly work online marketplace Snagajob, told Insider that he believes that "compensation and benefits that have typically been reserved for white-collar employees have now become expectations and norms in blue-collar jobs." He called the phenomenon the "white-collar-ization of blue-collar jobs."

Stevenson listed sign-on bonuses, educational benefits touted by industry giants like Amazon and Walmart, career path guidance, maternity and paternity leave, and mental health benefits as potential offerings that could bolster retention rates in blue-collar gigs.

Businesses that don't adapt to bring these offerings to the table will be the ones left under-staffed, according to Andrew Duffy, founder and CEO of Sparkplug, a software company specializing in incentive management for retail workers.

"The best workers will filter into the places where they're rewarded the most," Duffy said. "The businesses that are not able to acquire those workers and who aren't using these new systems of rewarding their workers in more meaningful ways for everything that they're doing, they're not going to survive."

And some hiring models are just simply out of touch with the reality of what a modern worker wants from their job. Some industries that are especially struggling, including supply chain and warehousing, often rely on staffing agencies to hire seasonal workers.

This outdated temp model, for example, needs to be replaced by a culture of professional development, traditionally a staple of white-collar jobs, Dan Johnston, the founder and CEO of logistics solutions provider WorkStep, told Insider. That means creating a pipeline that allows entry-level workers to gain skills and advance into harder-to-fill, specialized roles, "signaling to everybody within your organization: This is a company that's willing to invest in you, if you are willing to invest in us," Johnston said.

Quincy Valencia, the vice president of product innovation at the hiring platform Hourly by AMS, began her career in retail management. She said that, historically, companies have made the mistake of viewing many blue-collar workers as "replaceable."

"This category of worker - particularly in retail - has driven our economy over the past, especially here through this pandemic," she said. "And now there's a big mismatch right now between job availability and applicants for those jobs."

But there's been a shift in that thinking. During the pandemic, many frontline workers were hailed as heroes and labeled "essential." And some companies are starting to take note.

"We all depend on these folks," Maggie Barnett, the COO of logistics provider ShipHero, told Insider. "During COVID, most people were sitting at home. Thank goodness that everyone who went into the warehouses did what they did so that we could all have our luxuries. They should be rewarded and they should be noticed. That acknowledgement has been too long overdue."