As a specialist recruitment business we are continually asked by clients to recruit highly specialist skill-sets throughout the UK and Europe.
The nature of the high technology marketplace is that individual expertise and a collective capability of your people to deliver top quality solutions are the fundamental strengths of all successful businesses.
The critical part of that process is a companies’ ability to hire and retain top quality talent from a competitive marketplace. The other companies that you compete with are all looking to hire the same people so your ability to identify and hire the people you need often is the key difference between success and failure.
Time and time again we encounter companies that fundamentally do not understand this reality. They exude a persona of an employer with a super-tight job spec, little flexibility with 101 choices of which candidates to hire.
This situation is rarely the case. The modern day highly skilled labour market is invariably candidate-short; with more jobs than people. To succeed in this kind of market the approach has to be driven by compromise.
Whereas you have an “ideal” specification of who you want to hire, the more flexible and adaptable the specs is the better the end result of the right candidate.
There will always be some core “essential” skill-sets that the successful candidate must have, but our advice is to keep these essentials to an absolute minimum as they reduce your flexibility.
A major issue we encounter repeatedly is location. Traffic (particularly in the UK) is bad, motoring & train fares are expensive and so commuting can be a costly business.
If you are too specific on the need to get employees into your office, this reduces down the locations you can recruit from and significantly restricts your pool of candidates.
Ask yourself “Does this person/job really need to be in the office 5 days a week?” If the answer is “no” then look at home-working, reduced hours in the office and “hot desking” at other company sites that are easier for the employee to get to. To get the best people – you have to be flexible and make it work for the candidate to join your business.
A major development in employee/employer relationships over the last 10-15 years is work/life balance. The more you can do as an employer to facilitate a better work-life balance the easier it will be to hire and retain the top people.
The most flexible employers invariably recruit and retain the best people.
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