A new year is on the horizon, and UK recruitment faces an uncertain future: skills shortages remain an ever-present, ever-persistent issue; talent is becoming more mobile, more selective, and more resistant to employers’ traditional methods of courtship. And, of course, there is Brexit: the 50 stone gorilla of the political calendar, an event that could end up being business as usual – or an economically devastating event that fundamentally constrains access to labour. It depends who you ask.
Given the challenges and the complications associated with sourcing talent, ‘recruitment’ almost feels too simplistic to describe what modern employers require: ‘workforce solutions’ is perhaps more appropriate. Whatever we call it, the pool of skilled, experienced employees is becoming shallower – and businesses must adjust their approach to sourcing talent if they hope to maintain and improve their internal capabilities.
Here are the major challenges facing these businesses, and some guidance about overcoming them in the face of stiff competition.
Skill scarcity
In some areas, skills shortages are less a challenge than a simple fact of life: STEM shortages, for example, are endemic in the UK – research from STEM Learning indicates a shortfall of around 173,000 workers, and that 89% of STEM-focused businesses are struggling to fill positions – but on some level, it’s to be expected. Technical requirements can be very specific, and meeting them is unsurprisingly difficult.
In most cases, though, skills shortages are less about on-paper requirements than a failure of approach. Soft skills such as communication and empathy can be hard to gauge from a CV and cover letter, but in many jobs, they’re essential. Accordingly, a diverse approach to workforce solutions, one where candidates are compared not by job title and credentials exclusively, but by roles, responsibilities, experiences, and interests will likely yield better results. It’s often easier to teach technical skills to an employee with the requisite soft skills than it is to teach empathy and understanding to someone it doesn’t come naturally to.
This, however, requires the assent of employers and businesses – and here, recruiters have a chance to act as experts and advisors instead of just suppliers. When they know client businesses inside out, when they work with employers to understand their specific needs, when they share the knowledge they’ve acquired and work tirelessly to acquire more, they can develop more sophisticated hiring strategies for a more sophisticated modern workforce.
Falling unemployment
High employment is often seen as a net positive for society, and it is. But the inevitable fact is that it makes life difficult for employers when more people are in work – and unemployment is currently the lowest it’s been for forty years. For lower skilled roles, retailers struggle to find the seasonal staff they need over the Christmas/New Year period, and delivery drivers are increasingly shunning the large chains in favour of Deliveroo or Uber Eats, while skilled workers find more options available to them than ever before. The problem is only compounded by a 95% year-on-year drop in EU workers migrating to the UK, reported by the CIPD and Adecco.
Here, it’s also necessary to move beyond tradition: when it comes to high-skilled and specialised roles, competition is escalating - so jobseekers don’t have to take the first offer they receive. Sometimes it’s more effective to look within rather than spend money on traditional recruitment activity such as hiring: current employees are often a better bellwether of what a department needs than any external collaborator, and HR departments should make use of them. Recruiters should still, nonetheless, be hired to provide workforce solutions and consultancy.
But current employees can be useful for recruiters in a more literal and straightforward sense: with the right training and development initiatives, future leaders can be nurtured – rather than hired. They will, in turn, reward this investment: when employees feel valued, they tend to value their employers in kind.
Mobility, flexibility, and millennials
The millennial generation currently amounts to 35% of the UK’s workforce, and will – in time – become the dominant employment demographic. Recruiters and employers therefore can’t rely on the tactics they used to court baby boomers, who grew up preferring straightforward 9-5 office jobs and are suspicious of anything else.
Millennials want flexibility and mobility, not a job for life: remote working, short contracts, and even multiple jobs are commonplace for a generation that values experience and variety over consistent salaries and attractive benefits. It’s a mobile, agile workforce, and recruiters and employers alike should be mobile and agile to attract them. This is particularly true when it comes to things like recruitment marketing: there are more channels to reach candidates through, and more types of content to share with them. Keeping track of this workforce can be difficult, so anyone hiring millennial workers would be well-advised to consult their CRM database regularly: monitoring workplace movements, contract durations, and more can make it easy to redeploy candidates who’ve performed well in the past.
If a recruiter or business manages and updates this database regularly, it can fulfil requirements without making many – or any – full-time hires. To do so requires moving beyond tradition, and towards innovation and agility.
Because modern employers can’t be expected to flourish with outmoded techniques and strategies. The rote, infinitely repeatable business of sourcing and placing candidates is no longer going to sustain an organisation’s talent reserves, particularly with political, economic, and social changes looming.
In short, employers and recruiters need to move beyond recruitment, and towards workforce solutions: becoming consultants and advisers – the specialists who, yes, understand how to review a CV and filter candidates out, but also understand the strategic importance of talent to a business, defying convention where appropriate and necessary. The world of work is changing; recruiters must change with it.
