Andrew Pickup
Debbie Chinn
Zowi Whittaker
Lisa Brady
Simon Milnes
Rebecca Coombes
Sam Fletcher
ZW:Operationally we don’t have enough people coming through. Everyone knows about the HGV driver crisis. We have continued to retain our drivers but getting new ones is horrendous.
We’ve got orders coming out of our ears and we are juggling resources between our group of companies to maintain the level of service we are expected to deliver to customers. There is so much competition for drivers. We’ve had people leaving after being offered £25 to £30 an hour to be a bulldozer driver.
It’s going to have to slow down and those people that are offering those rates are going to have to pass it on to the customers, there’s no other way around it, and it is going to come full circle.
GH: There are five businesses in our group and each faces its own challenges. The biggest I find is the sales element of the job. It is a very undervalued area. The problem is you can’t get any sort of apprenticeship scheme for a sales person. It is barely recognised as a trade now.
DC: The problems fall into sectors. In manufacturing and engineering there is an
Sue Denver
ageing workforce. In younger technology-type businesses there is an issue of people leaving the area because they think to make their money and to have the career advantages that they want they must move south.
There is recognition that apprenticeships can fill gaps but the overall question lots of people ask me is, ‘Where are all the people?’ It is as if we’ve suddenly shrunk the population. We’ve got all these vacancies and we haven’t enough people to fill them.
GH: Hybrid working is creating an absolute headache for employers. It is a great principle, let’s work from home and as a business we can cut our overheads. But the flip side is we tried it for a while and productivity dropped through the floor.
DC: A lot of young start-up or pre-start up businesses I speak to are people who have perhaps worked in HR, health and safety and recruitment and have thought they’d like to stay working from home, so set up as self-employed.
SM:We are an escape room company and the thing that we really struggle with in recruitment
Gavin Hall
is trying to get people to realise that they can actually have a career with us. They don’t see the progression, that they could become part of the sales team or have an admin role.
What are you doing as a business to meet the challenges and what is the new good practice for recruitment?
SM:We have changed the way we do our recruitment. We now take potential employees out to the golfing range. It literally takes people out of their comfort zone, which is where you need to be in our industry. You have to be able to deal with all the different kinds of groups that you will come across and you must be out of your comfort zone all the time. It has helped us identify a new kind of person.
RC: Because we are really struggling to find qualified auditors and accountants, we’re having to think about the role that they fulfil within the business. We’re looking at what tasks don’t need a qualified accountant or auditor and creating new roles to take those away from them, so they can focus purely on the tasks that do.
Continued on page 40
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