The skills shortage, Brexit, the weakening pound – it is all sounding rather bleak. For many, the constant diagnoses of the UK's macro-scale problems are disheartening, especially as little salve is offered.
With desperate times driving desperate measures, more businesses are turning to hiring who they can rather than who they want. This practice is leading to a high churn rate and high recruitment costs.
In fact, according to the survey, conducted by The Open University, 90% of employers revealed that they had faced difficulties recruiting workers with the relevant skills in the last 12 months. What’s worse, making the wrong hire can cost a business more than £132,000. The accumulative costs involved in bad recruitment include money wasted on training, lost productivity, and increased staff turnover, according to the Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC).
To look for a solution, Recruitment Grapevine spoke to Ben Brett, Board Growth Adviser at Recruit4vets, about the trends affecting the industry at present, which could be reducing the calibre of candidates walking through firms’ doors.
He explains: “Firms that engage in increasing numbers of agencies rather than getting more from a lower number of quality suppliers, is a big de-motivator. There is only a finite number of candidates looking for work. Spreading the net wider reduces agency commitment and leads to poor practices of submitting unsuitable, uncommitted candidates quickly, just in case another recruiter gets there first.
“This is then compounded as the recruitment process slows and means that quality, highly relevant candidates can slip through the net or are put off as they’re contacted by multiple agencies about the same clinic so assume there must be something wrong with working there.”
He advises firms to engage with selective agencies who really understand an offering and can work to develop your employer brand. “Consider building your own recruitment function or outsourcing it to a managing supplier, it’s not simply about who can send you CVs," he continues. "A great service and contributor to your growth and success can be unlocked with more symbiotic supplier relationships - knowing the owners and managers of agencies and working with them to determine the strategy. Such relationships take time, work and give and take and long term will yield results.”
Brett also states that “overly fixed salary banding can reduce access to talent and can be a barrier to retaining very high performers’’.
Instead, he advises firms to create a talent matrix and map their own staff against it to ensure consistency and fairness, connected directly to individual contribution within the context of your variables. “Well thought out remuneration systems will go some way to increasing return on your talent investment,” he concludes.
