For businesses trying to attract and retain talent in order to drive growth, it’s undeniably tough out there at the moment.
And for small and medium enterprises (SME), that often don’t have extensive recruitment resources and capacity to draw on internally, it’s tougher still.
It’s not just about the difficulty in 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 employ people to drive growth – or even just to maintain your productivity – what, if anything, can you do about it?
Understanding the shortfall
First of all, it’s important to grasp the extent of the problem.
Research from the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) shows 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 experiencing skills shortages – an inordinately high figure in itself – but the situation becomes graver still in certain sectors.
In manufacturing, for instance, 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 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.
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, both through networking activities and through our Member2Member offers.
Members deliver 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.
These 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 help you recruit from overseas), onboarding, HR contracts and compliance, and so on.
A generational transformation
And though society is, essentially, now paying the price for a decline in the alignment between young people’s skills and employers’ needs that started many years ago, at the Chamber we’re at the forefront of the turnaround.
We can connect your recruits and employees to extensive training and upskilling services, 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.
We’re also 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 our friendly team on 01582 522448. Read the latest LSIP Report at https://www.chamber-business.com/lsip
