British Chamber of Commerce: Skills shortage most significant risk for business

The British Chamber of Commerce publishes a quarterly economic survey which is a must read for anyone involved in recruitment, hiring or talent acquisition. Over 7,000 businesses took part in the survey, released earlier this month, and the results are a good indicator of what is in store not only for the UK economy but the impact of exports, pricing, recruitment, business growth and more.

Growth in the UK economy looks set to remain subdued, and the findings revealed that skills shortages are reaching critical levels. Of the service sector firms hiring, the percentage reporting recruitment difficulties rose to 71%, the highest since records began. In manufacturing, the percentage of recruiting firms reporting problems is at its highest since Q4 2016.

The percentage of businesses attempting to recruit fell slightly from 52% to 50%. Of those, the rate of services firms reporting greater recruitment difficulties rose from 67% to 71%, the highest since records began.

Recruitment success in a candidate scarce & competitive market

The report goes on to share how the skills gap is hindering an organisations ability to find the workers they need. Candidate scarcity is a massive challenge for in-house recruiters with increased competion for the attention of skilled candidates – and their often growing expectations of employers.

Brexit or no Brexit, it looks like the skills gap is here to stay for the time being and recruiters need to act now to fully understand their requirements and be ready with a pipeline of potential candidates and ‘warmed up’ talent for the future.

Recruiters should take note of the challenges they will face and prioritise what needs to be done to mitigate candidate attraction and sourcing issues, for example, understanding which candidate sourcing channels are working best to attract the right candidates. Another major area to consider is how you approach candidate sourcing – is it reactive (post a job and hope active candidates apply) or pro-active (marketing your jobs to a databse or talent pool of candidates you have been nurturing over the mid to longer term). In support of this, technology continues to develop rapidly by helping to reduce administration time – enabling recruiters to do what they do best (and enjoy most) spending time talking with candidates – maintaining the human touch has never been more critical within recruitment.

You can read more on how to get ahead with candidate attraction and benchmark yourself against peers in our free 2018 Candidate Attraction Report.

How Travelodge improved their candidate journey

Another useful resource to download is Travelodge’s case study which shares what they did to develop the candidate journey with some phenomenal results….to give you an overview, the hospitality industry has grown faster than any sector since 2008 and contributes over 17% of the UK workforce. It has traditionally been heavily reliant on European workers and Travelodge is no exception. They reviewed their workforce segmentation to understand specific audiences and revisit their attraction strategy to mitigate the risk that skills shortages can bring.