For businesses trying to attract and retain talent in order to drive growth – and let’s face it, which business isn’t trying to do that? – there’s a very apt phrase that describes how things are at the moment: ‘It’s tough out there!’
This is true even of larger businesses with significant talent acquisition resources, so at the small and medium enterprise (SME) end of the scale, where there often just isn’t the recruitment expertise and capacity to draw on internally, the issue is being felt particularly acutely.
It’s a challenge that strikes from many angles at once. It’s not just about competing with other employers to appeal to talent. It’s also about addressing the challenges of low unemployment and the poverty trap that many economically inactive people face when transitioning into work.
And although this situation is often referred to broadly as the ‘skills shortage,’ it’s important to remember that there are implications far beyond simply not finding people to fill your roles – in fact, the skills shortage also often means the candidates you do find don’t have the training and education they need to do the job.
So, if you’re that SME struggling to fill posts that are key to driving your growth – or even just maintaining your productivity – what, if anything, can you do about it?
Understanding the shortfall
To identify the solutions, we must first delve deeper into the nature of the problem, and at Bedfordshire Chamber we’ve worked with the wider British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) organisation to gather data and insights that have helped it produce some very illuminating statistics.
The BCC’s research shows, for example, that from May to July 2024, there were 884,000 vacancies in the economy, but the low unemployment rate provided little impetus to drive applicants to fill them.
As result, some 62% of businesses reported they are experiencing skills shortages – an inordinately high figure in itself – but the situation becomes graver still in certain sectors, like manufacturing, where 74% of companies cited similar difficulties. The old joke phrase ‘You just can’t get the staff’ has never sounded less flippant.
Across all sectors, it’s SMEs that encounter the greatest challenge in this respect, but the research suggests that this is not just down to lack of resources. Rather, it also has to do with an absence of recruitment and retention strategies that target employees’ and prospective employees’ priorities, needs and values – flexible working, for example, or wellbeing incentives, or sustainability, or inclusivity based on ethnicity or neurodivergence.
In short, recruitment and retention need to evolve very rapidly to deliver success in a market that is very much loaded in the candidates’ favour.
But where do you start?
Recruitment, retention, training – a one-stop-shop
The good news is you don’t have to do all this yourself. As with any programme of change, success is often down to taking advice and accepting guidance from experts – and at Bedfordshire Chamber of Commerce, we have a proven track record of connecting businesses to experts who can deliver successful, cost-effective recruitment and retention expertise to our members, both through networking activities and through our Member2Member offers.
Membership delivers everything you need to enable your organisation’s recruitment and retention benefits – and its company values – to stand out from the crowd and help you source and keep talent.
They include, amongst many others; health, wellbeing and reward services, incentivisation programmes, remote and hybrid working planning, childcare, counselling, and sustainability measurement and improvement.
At the same time, Chamber membership also connects you to expertise within the network for the practical and logistical elements of actually recruiting staff, including immigration processes (to enable you to counter local and national shortfalls in talent by recruiting from overseas), onboarding, HR contracts and compliance, and so on.
And we can also add value to your recruits and employees by connecting them to extensive training and upskilling services, member webinars, and learning tools – covering everything from IT literacy to professional and industry qualifications – helping you ensure you have the right people in the right posts, with the right skills.
A generational transformation
But if there’s one truth the current situation has exposed, it’s that the roots of the skills shortage in particular go back a generation or more.
We are, essentially, paying the price now for a decline in the alignment between young people’s skills and employers’ needs that started many years ago.
For this reason, at the Chamber we’re tackling the problem from this perspective, too, working closely with educators, training organisations, employers, and the Government on programmes like the Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs).
These will prepare today’s young people more effectively for recruitment and work, and so make growth and development less of an uphill struggle for businesses like yours – today and in the future.
For more information on how to join Bedfordshire Chamber of Commerce, visit www.chamber-business.com, or call 01582 522448.
CEO
Bedfordshire Chamber of Commerce
