FEATURE INSIGHT
Winning the war for talent
Jerome Smail, freelance journalist, reveals the ways to recruit and retain talented employees as demand for increases
O rganisations depend on talent. It is their lifeblood. Regardless of business plan, strategy, market proposition or investment, if a company lacks the right people to put it all into practice, it will be doomed to failure. So, every company is faced with a dual challenge – not only to find the best talent available but to retain it too. And if that wasn’t hard enough, every business worth its salt in the same arena is trying to do the same thing. What’s more, other factors are making those challenges harder. According to last November’s quarterly Labour Market Outlook from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and The Adecco Group, based on a survey of 1,002 organisations, employer plans to take on more staff are being hit by worsening skills and labour shortages. According to the study, this is partly as a result of a sudden reversal in the growth in the number of both EU and non-EU migrants in employment in the UK. Alex Fleming, country head and president of staffing and solutions for
The Adecco Group UK and Ireland, sums up the situation: “The labour market in the UK is tight and this research is reporting increasingly high levels of recruitment and retention difficulties. While the data is not showing wages rising across the board, we are regularly seeing this pressure being exerted in the recruitment space. ...money alone is not the silver bullet that many employers believe it to be “Our clients are often surprised at the market rates when they are making talent-attraction decisions. This ‘supply shock’ and other pressures will only serve to increase these difficulties, which could easily flow out into the rest of the workforce. In turn, this could cause a wider upward movement on wages.” Gerwyn Davies, senior labour market
analyst for the CIPD, says: “It’s vital that businesses understand the workforce challenges they face, and make the relevant investment in skills and adopt the right people management practices to boost productivity in their organisation.” It’s fair to say many businesses are aware of the task they face. According to a survey of human resources (HR) managers by best-practice organisation AXELOS in August 2018, recruiting and retaining talent is the biggest challenge for business right now. But the same study showed that the stakes are high: getting the hiring process wrong now costs organisations an average of £16,843 in each case. So, it seems an increasingly small pool of the right candidates is the battleground. How can employers win the war for talent? Just because there is a skills shortage across the board doesn’t mean you should lower your expectations. Richard Bradley, managing director UK and Ireland of staffing business Kelly says: “It
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | March 2019 | Issue 48 38
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