RECRUITMENT
Finding the right people
"If a good engineer or salesperson comes on the market, then you need to move quickly."
We’ve all been talking about the skills shortage for years. But how does it look from the perspective of recruitment? Andrew Fleet, Managing Director of Technical Recruitment Solutions (TRS), gives us his view of the HVAC skills market evolution.
What specifi c HVACR skill sets are currently in short supply across the UK
market? AC and refrigeration engineers are in dire need – massive shortages of people with seniority, as well as junior engineers. I could spend all week picking up vacancies and not fi nd anyone. The only engineer roles you can fi nd people for these days are roles that off er either fl exibility, an above-market salary or no London working. In fact, London is particularly interesting. Whilst you get
more options working a role there, since Covid, people’s attitudes to work have changed. Not for everyone, of course, but it has woken a lot of people up to the idea that working 70 hours plus a week doesn’t make sense. Spending hours on the road, etc, just isn’t worth it. The diffi culty of driving to a job in London now, due to congestion charges, pedestrianised areas and traffi c, has also made people cold to this. Engineers are more than ever keen to avoid working in London. It’ll come as no surprise that heat pump engineers have
28 October 2025 •
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become the number one in demand. The growth has been unprecedented, and engineers haven’t been able to keep up. Manufacturers could do far more in terms of training and the way they recruit. You’ll often get a brief for a heat pump engineer with 10 years’ experience, whereas 10 years ago the market was something like fi ve times smaller, so it’s what we’d look for, but you aren’t always likely to fi nd it. I think each manufacturer should have to sign up to putting so many apprentices through college or appointing a certain number of apprentices per year. This could be a practical step to solving further shortages of engineers in the future.
What trends are you seeing in terms of candidates?
I’ve seen a slight rise in people wanting to move into HVAC. On the sales side in particular, vast numbers of people from electrical and lighting backgrounds want to get into it, and a lot of mechanical engineering graduates are interested in heat pump companies.
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