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DEBATE RECRUITMENT


IN ASSOCIATION WITH:


FILLING THE GAPS


Recruitment and job retention are two of the biggest challenges facing Lancashire companies. It’s an area that isn’t likely to get any easier in 2022. With Blackburn College we brought together our panel of experts to examine the issues and consider what can be done to attract and keep the workers our businesses need as they look to recover from the impact of the pandemic


Hannah Allen


PRESENT: Richard Slater


Lancashire Business View (Chair)


Blackburn Youth Zone Ian Brown


Hive Business Network


Nicola Clayton Blackburn College


Fazal Dad Blackburn College


James Dunne Prestige Beds


David Gorton PM+M


Michele Lawty-Jones Lancashire Skills Hub


Ian Liddle Farleys Solicitors


What are Lancashire’s key recruitment challenges?


MLJ: Early in the pandemic we did see a big jump in unemployment. Now the number of vacancies is going through the roof. In terms of vacancies, it’s the highest I’ve ever known. There are 4,000 health and social care vacancies just in Lancashire. Areas like food and agriculture and hospitality are also areas with a real need. We’ve seen a jump in IT related vacancies and green jobs. We’ve seen an exit of our EU workforce and that has had an impact. Businesses need to ensure that they are good places to work to attract staff. They need to think about their terms and conditions and their culture.


We do have unemployed people, and a plethora of programmes, so we need to be working together to pivot our unemployed people into those jobs.


DG: It’s not just a skills shortage, it’s a body shortage, as one of my contacts described it the other day.


We’ve doubled in size over the last eight years and took the decision about five years ago that we needed to grow our own. There was a shortage of appropriately skilled people we could bring in if we wanted to be a leading organisation, we needed to be recruiting apprentices and growing skills that way. Up to the pandemic we were recruiting six or seven apprentices a year.


You add a lot of youth and energy to the organisation and that’s great, you bring some real gems in. What you do find is your retention of apprentices is not as great as your retention of experienced hires.


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