The Ones Who Get Away: Fishing From A Shrinking Talent Pool
In this period of high employment, and fewer migrant workers, vacancies in Bath and the surrounding area are going unfilled. Is it time to cast the net wider? Or narrow the holes to stop talent slipping away?
“W
e had someone who was very good at administration duties, paid excellent attention to detail and always wanted to work in a hospital. “The NHS locally was employing people to do blood tests, paying quite senior staff to do a role when they could have been working in intensive care situations instead. We talked to them about how to start looking differently at the way they did things. We said we could free up the time for that person to do other aspects of the job. We could also add value by creating a new job that would be specific to our jobseeker’s needs. “The team were blown away by the fact they would be able to do it like that.” Alicia Moyles is Head of Service for Specialist Employment at The Education
4 OPENING DOORS
People, part of Kent County Council. Her role is to help employers think more creatively to fill staffing gaps by lining up talent from communities that are often overlooked. The organisation engages people with additional needs, ranging from kids in special schools needing help to raise their aspirations to disabled people who have been left alone by services for twenty years or more. Alicia believes most employers are missing a trick. “Now we have someone in a full-time role that does an admin job and also does the blood testing in that department to make sure those records are correct. It freed up a lot more front-of-house work so the doctors can work more closely with more patients. It became a much more streamlined service.”
The Recruitment Challenge
Employers in Bath and North East Somerset (B&NES) are at the business end of political uncertainty, as the toing and froing of Brexit impacts the numbers visiting the area and coming here to work. Britain is also experiencing the highest employment levels since the 1970s, already making life harder for recruiters. Meanwhile, support agencies claim the talents of some unemployed people are being overlooked. Is it time to think differently about building a workforce? A number of projects in B&NES work with employers to consider the talent that often slips through the net. They ask: Your recruitment systems are designed to be fair but are they excluding people capable of the job, just not the application process? Or are the jobs themselves the
