It’s no secret that businesses want to recruit the best talent. The right skills combined with several years of industry experience is invaluable; a suitable candidate makes a big difference not only to the quality of work but the bottom line too. Yet many businesses are struggling to recruit individuals that have the necessary experience or the relevant skills – and just the right combination of the two. Skills shortages, tough competition and an unstable political and economic climate combine to make the recruitment market extremely tough across all industries – though not impossible with the right help.

Why experience matters

In any industry or line of work the more time someone has spent carrying out tasks successfully, the less supervision they will require and the more effective they will be. Once an individual has three, five or ten years’ experience under their belt they will have encountered many different scenarios, have experience handling clients and varying workloads. At this point the employee may become more useful generally to the employer, as they start to think about developing their career in terms of management or specialising in a certain area that delivers a competitive advantage.

And it’s not just well-honed practical skills that form the backbone of experience. Take the engineering sector; EngineeringUK reports that annually the UK is ‘at least’ 20,000 short of the graduates required to fill engineering posts. The chronic skills shortage is a difficult hurdle for many different businesses to overcome yet it may not be as simple as hiring someone with a degree. Speaking to Director magazine Helen Atkinson, engineering professor at the University of Leicester, says that recent graduates often lack the commercial know-how that is the sum of technical ability and knowledge of how businesses stay profitable.

Experience delivers on the bottom line: businesses need well-rounded candidates that are capable, commercially savvy and have seen most it before. And once they have them, they need to hold on to them.

The three-year itch

Once an employee reaches a point where they are trained and they have some relevant industry experience they become a valuable asset, hence the reason why it’s so difficult to recruit candidates at this stage of their career. The business that spent time and money training the individual is faced with the prospect that they may jump ship, taking valuable knowledge and experience with them. It’s in the company’s best interests to keep hold of those individuals and retain those valuable skills. Simultaneously, they need to attract more staff at that crucial stage of their career in order to keep growing – and competition is high.

Competition isn’t just rife from other businesses within comparable industries, it’s an issue facing all industries. The IT sector is a good example of this: as technology changes and develops the need for people with those skills increases. An IT expert isn’t just needed at Microsoft or IBM, they are potentially needed by any industry or by any company that employs its own IT personnel and requires those skills. So now the competition doesn’t just come from Hewlett Packard or Dell, it could come from the banking and finance industry, healthcare, retail – anywhere.

If a candidate feels tempted by an offer elsewhere there needs to be good incentives for them to stay. Globalisation is another key factor in competition for candidates. An increasingly connected world brings new opportunities for work as well as potential overseas employment that may prove tempting. If businesses are to remain competitive it’s essential that they attract and retain employees that are highly desirable to other businesses both in the UK and abroad.

How to beat the competition and recruit the best candidates?

Recruitment can be a stressful affair at the best of times and especially so in the midst of a skills shortage. Posting an ad on job board or the company website can feel like sifting through an awful lot of sand to find a small amount of gold. It’s time-consuming and takes the focus off running the business, winning new work and delivering existing work. This is where a recruitment agency can really prove its worth.

A reputable, experienced agency will have an extensive network of contacts and a large database of potential candidates at their disposal which can save a lot of recruitment legwork. Any agency worth their salt will have developed good relationships with their candidates and will be able to act as an effective, trustworthy middleman between the two parties.

While there is no magic solution, by being alert to issues surrounding competition and retention companies stand a better chance of attracting skilled, experienced individuals. A professional recruitment partner doesn’t just present a list of the best candidates, they can offer advice on how best to retain them: an investment that pays dividends now and in the future.

If you found this blog interesting, check out our other blog on Where’s all the talent gone?.  Furthermore, contact our team to speak about your recruiting needs, call 01772 259 121.

You place an ad with a recruitment agency, excited to see who will apply and what the crop of candidates will bring. Your business has a great reputation, an attractive benefits package and you offer a generous salary, so why aren’t quality candidates queuing up for an interview?

It’s a familiar story. Plenty of undergraduates show an interest in degrees such as engineering, design, and media, to name but a few. And while the number of students applying for higher education courses are down by 5% according to UCAS, the figure still stands at over half a million. While the numbers appear healthy at first glance, the reality is that businesses in an array of industries are struggling to keep pace with changing demands, and to find the candidates to meet those demands.

What does a talent shortage mean for business?

A lack of talent can sometimes feel like something of a vicious circle for businesses. Training a new staff member or apprentice from scratch incurs costs: the cost of recruiting them in the first place, not to mention the time and money put into expanding their knowledge, skills and experience.

Then there’s the fear that the individual will leave, taking all of that know-how with them, and resulting in further costs as the recruitment and training cycle begins again. And yet if companies don’t have the people to do the job, they’re unable to meet client demands and their bottom line suffers. It’s a catch-22 situation which puts businesses under pressure to retain existing talent and attract new talent from a shrinking pool.

Businesses must take action to remain competitive

When it comes to attracting and retaining talent, investment and training are vital. Whatever sector you work in, technology offers new ways of doing things that simply didn’t exist five years ago: from health and social care to aerospace engineering, technology is playing an increasingly important role in the workplace. If companies don’t move forward by investing in new technologies, they risk alienating candidates that are keen to be at the forefront of developing new processes and innovation.

Alongside investment in best practice for the future, training is another key factor in offering a competitive edge to candidates. If there are no opportunities to grow and develop it’s unlikely that the top-quality candidates will be keen to invest their time in your business. Demonstrating that there are clear progression paths and supporting staff to find better ways of doing things shows that you’re forward thinking, client-centered and interested in being – and employing – the best.
A skills shortage puts businesses in a difficult situation, as industry-specific skills only come from working in industry. Of course, businesses will always want to attract those who already possess those skills, and it can be frustrating having to develop staff when you need them to have the skills now. As time moves on and client demands change so too must the skills offered by business: flexibility is key. It’s important for businesses not to fall into the trap of thinking that recruiting new staff will always solve their current problems; the responsibility also lies with the business itself to train and bring on the next wave of leaders and experts.

The most important factor for businesses

With ways of working changing faster than they have in decades and technological advances continuing apace, flexibility is the defining characteristic businesses in all industries need to display. Investing in better ways of doing things and training staff is all well and good, but it’s only relevant until circumstances and client demands change next week, next month, or next year. Companies need to have one eye on the future, one eye on the lay of the land, and adjust and readjust as times move on to be in with a fighting chance of attracting – and keeping – the very best candidates.

Contact us today to see how we can assist you with your recruitment needs, by calling us on 01772 259121 or Register a Vacancy directly.

It’s a common scenario – a sudden departure of key talent in your organisation leaves you panicked and desperately requiring new skills to bridge the gaps left as a result…and fast.

And while you can recruit on an ad-hoc basis and temporarily stem problematic issues from snowballing, there is another way. Recent developments in recruitment mean organisations no longer have to rely on inefficient fire-fighting methods to deal with recruitment challenges as and when they occur.

Analytics to prepare for change

Many of the biggest businesses are already using big data to their advantage by understanding customer needs and desires at a really granular level.

Yet recruitment is lagging behind, and to some extent, this is symptomatic of the dispersed nature of the candidate base – the more we can know about candidate behaviour, the better we will become at matching candidates with roles. Accurate predictive candidate behaviour is, of course, the nirvana but we’re still a little way off that!

So while HR has traditionally been focused on people skills rather than number crunching, only now are organisations realising the potential of using analytics to prepare for any changes, as well as improving their bottom line.

How does it work within recruitment?

The growth of recruitment analytics stems from the age-old issue of supply and demand. When your talent leaves or your business is growing, you will inevitably require new skills – utilising a data-driven approach can help to tackle these hiring issues before they become serious and affect the productivity of your organisation.

Beyond this, HR analytics can be used for very specific needs and requirements – for example, they can be adopted to ascertain when your senior executives are eligible to retire, to recognise current employees’ behaviour, or to reveal certain job roles that are targeted by competitors so that you can better focus your retention efforts.

Identifying skills and talent

One of the most common challenges that most organisations encounter is how to deal with the departure of talent, and how to bridge any resulting skills gaps quickly and effectively.

In these cases, analytics can be used to identify what expertise you have at hand, which can then be cross-referenced with those skills required and the talent you are likely to lose in the short to medium-term future. Details can be based on a wide range of factors including an individual’s propensity to change roles so far in their career, qualitative factors like whether they’ve appeared more disengaged with their work, and even things like whether they’ve recently updated LinkedIn, which could be a sign that they’re considering a new role.

These factors combined – along with a whole host of other information – allow companies to map their entire business, and identify those roles that may need filling in the future. By doing this, organisations are able to effectively implement cross-training, redeployment or hire, and ultimately plan better for potential future shortages.

So, are analytics the solution?

Data and number crunching is by no means a be-all and end-all solution, but when aligned with the ability to understand people skills and challenges, it can make a significant difference to HR departments. What’s more, as the ideas and programmes used to deliver this information mature, analytics will only become ever more effective within businesses.

To talk further about how data can be used to prevent panicked hiring and ensure your organisation is prepared for the worst, talk to us at Clayton Recruitment – we’d be more than happy to help.

Check out some of our other blogs to find career and development advice for both businesses and professionals. Or take a look at some of our current jobs

Tattoos are a subject of much debate at the moment and it appears that views towards them have shifted considerably in recent times. Just a decade ago it’s likely that few professional employers would have welcomed them in a work environment, but now they’re seen as commonplace in many companies and views towards them have become much more positive. But are tattoos, as some research suggests, a ‘barrier to employment’?

A study commissioned by ACAS from academics at King’s College London found that body art is still seen as unacceptable at many workplaces. This struck us as odd. After all, tattoos are considerably more prevalent than they ever have been with the latest figures suggesting that 1 in 3 young adults in the UK has one and that we’re not going to reach a tipping point until 2025, when the UK’s supplies of ink may or may not run out.

It’s hard to pinpoint when the craze really took off. Back in the 80s and even early 90s tattoos were seen as a sure fire method to make your mum cry and to steer you away from any stereotypically ‘professional’ roles. Some have suggested that Patient Zero was David Beckham, or Amy Winehouse, but really the trend is buried deeper in the cultural complexities of this country than that.

Tattoos – an issue for jobseekers?

One of the main issues for jobseekers – and employers – is now how to deal with tattoos and their role in the workplace. Organisations, after all, that are completely against hiring anyone with a visible tattoo are essentially ruling out up to a third of young professionals which, in times when skills shortages are rife, doesn’t seem like an intelligent approach.

As Director of HR Diversity Consultancy, The Clear Company, Kate Headley says – “Tattoos are perhaps seen by some as an indication of someone’s background, often associated with criminal behaviour, anti-establishment thinking and a lack of respect for authority. Yet these are all assumptions based on conceptions created by a broader society influenced by stereotypes, like the tendency for people with tattoos being depicted as the ‘bad guys’ in fiction. The issue for people with tattoos is getting employers to see beyond this stereotypical bias.”

A personal choice?

Tattoos are a personal choice, however it’s not illegal to discriminate against someone with one which means it often comes down to bias and the aforementioned stereotypes to drive decision making. You could argue that they’re a choice made by the individual who then has to live with their decision, but the same could be said about religion and we all know it’s illegal to discriminate on the basis of faith.

Feel free to disagree (we’d love to hear your views) but we believe that tattoos, unless they’re particularly offensive or poorly positioned, don’t affect an individual’s credibility or their ability to do their job, so why should they be seen as a negative? Of course, there is another school of thought that suggests that work is a time for professionalism and that all tattoos are linked to personal lives and should be kept under wraps during working hours. But as we all know, life in and out of work is becoming ever more converged so where does that leave us when it comes to things like flexible working, or having the ability to work from home?

Ultimately, it’s down to the employer. The best ones are unlikely to doubt you because you’ve got a tattoo and those that do should perhaps consider the size of the workforce that they’re essentially ruling out from ever working for them by doing so.

If you are looking for further advice then why not check out our advice pages