RECRUITMENT DEBATE IN ASSOCIATION WITH:
PRESENT: Richard Slater, Lancashire Business View (Chair) Dr Jenni Barrett, UCLan Emma Clay, Partners& Stephen Cutler, Partners&
Charlotte Gittins, Worden Green Recruitment Amanda Harvey, Staci Arran Kelly, WEC Group Rachel Rump, Lancashire County Council Emma Swan, Forbes Solicitors Victoria White, Tickled Trout Gary Wilson, Forbo Flooring Systems
WHY RECRUITMENT IS STILL HARD WORK
With the support of insurance advisory service Partners& we brought our panel of experts to the Tickled Trout Hotel in Preston to discuss their recruitment and retention challenges
What are your retention and recruitment challenges and what strategies do you engage to meet them?
JB: The university sector’s climate is currently unstable. Changing the way business is done is giving us an opportunity to reprofile our staff expertise.
There are new things that we need to teach our students: personal and human-centric skills, managing digital transformation and adaptability and business agility. So, we need new skills.
We are always sorry when we lose some brilliant people and their experience, the flipside is an opportunity to reprofile the expertise we have and what we’re teaching students.
ES: Prior to the pandemic we had a flexible approach, extremely supportive when it came to the work-life balance. We operated work from home, so while we couldn’t necessarily compete on salary with our competitors, certainly in Manchester and Liverpool, we were able to offer that work life balance.
We also have an exceptional quality of work, which sometimes surprises people who join
us from city firms. The pandemic saw peoples’ priorities change. Larger firms were able to offer a big hike in salary and people weren’t expected to go into the office. That took a bit of an edge off our offer.
What we’re seeing now is that those larger businesses are expecting people back in the office more, they have significantly higher demands than businesses such as ours in more regional firms, and the flexibility isn’t quite what they thought it was going to be.
In the meantime, we have done an awful lot in terms of our salaries, our benefits package, to make sure we are more competitive.
AH: The problems for us peaked at 2022 and since then it has definitely got better and that might be because of the efforts we’ve made.
It was so difficult that we had to re-evaluate our talent management and recruitment strategy and stop and reconsider what we had been doing.
The challenge has been the national shortage of forklift drivers post-Brexit. Something like 7,000 forklift drivers left the UK. The consequence was a big shortfall in that skillset, huge wage
inflation and turnover levels. Without a forklift driver your warehouse just doesn’t operate. We now pay them significantly more, with around a 25 per cent increase over the past three years. We get out and shout about a proposition we’ve got for employees.
AK: Welding fabricators and CNC programmers are very rare. Of 15,000 school leavers in Lancashire last year, I’d probably say 20 to 30 chose those as apprenticeships.
BAE Systems has a lot of graduate and apprenticeship schemes. We saw that and that’s what we now do. We’ve invested £3m building our own state-of-the-art academy. It has the capacity to take on 33 welding apprentices every year, so essentially, we are our own college. We take them through a full level three qualification.
When it comes to welders, it is a bidding war. We’re a larger business in the area but bigger companies can pay double our rates. I can’t imagine the struggles others are going through. It is a mix of not enough people and big companies being able to splash the cash
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