A new survey released by the Australian Institute of Management (AIM) said that employers are hard pressed to hunt and keep their brightest staff while struggling at the same time to give out handsome pays without costing huge capital outlays while cruising through economic recovery.

AIM NSW/ACT chief executive David Wakeley said that company owners are facing the challenge of "finding ways to keep good people without incurring huge wage cost blowouts as the job market continues to improve."

He said that employers held the upper hand in bargaining position during the past two years of global financial crisis but employees slowly gained control as recovery started setting in with "workers who may have tightened their belts in leaner times will again be on the hunt for new opportunities and bigger pay packets."

The AIM survey said that about 90 percent of major companies would undertake wage review by next year compared to about 73.6 percent of salary increases awarded in 2009/10.

The survey also showed that 50 percent of these companies are looking to bolster permanent staff by 2009/10, an improvement of 39.6 percent from the previous year, while about 12.5 percent of companies would likely slash the numbers of permanent workers.

At the same time, more that 30 percent of large firms complained of difficulties in hunting skilled employees notwithstanding that the country's unemployment rate has reached a high of 5.8 percent in mid-2009, with current jobless rate settling at 5.4 percent in April.

Mr Wakeley is expecting that the skills shortage will make a turn for the worst and naturally, "employers need to move sooner rather than later to lock in their best and brightest in those sectors most susceptible to skills shortages."

The AIM report also showed that more and more large companies are willing to offer attractive and flexible salary packages though fewer workers in these large companies were getting extra payments above the superannuation government contribution of nine percent.

The survey studied data collected from 740 companies, with 546 large firms and 204 small outfits as respondents and AIM pointed to Western Australia staff as enjoying the highest average compensation rise of 4.6 percent for 2009/10 while those in NSW/ACT got only 3.65 percent increase, which is the lowest tallied by the report.