Good candidates are hard to find for small businesses

   

Small and medium-sized businesses across the UK are struggling to recruit staff with some 172,000 reporting that they receive no applications for some job vacancies. This provides a valuable opportunity for many recruitment agencies and Bibby Financial Services is urging the industry to sit up and meet this need.

While skills shortages among candidates are sometimes an issue, frequently it is simply that smaller organisations do not have a dedicated, trained resource available internally to address recruitment. The recruitment headache may be further exacerbated by the fact that if they do manage to find good staff, retention can be a challenge without an HR team committed to staff development.

Bibby Financial Services believes that with small and medium-sized businesses in need of help recruiting, recruitment agencies should be focusing on plugging the labour gap and spending less time justifying their fees for this valuable service.

Anna Hutton, director of Bristol-based recruitment company Flying Colours explains: “by using industry contacts, advertising, and word of mouth recruitment agencies can find skilled candidates where small businesses struggle.

Agencies can also interview large numbers of candidates to make sure that only the most suitable people reach the company. At this point they undertake tests, liaise with candidates to arrange interviews and negotiate salary and terms and conditions of employment packages.

It takes a trained consultant with industry knowledge and someone who is resilient, confident, organised, dedicated and is essentially a strong sales professional to place the right person in the right job. The amount of time and energy recruitment agencies spend finding and placing the best candidates is crucial and they need to stop apologising for charging a fee for providing this valuable service”.

David Robinson, chief executive of Bibby Financial Services said: “In order to win business and remain competitive recruitment agencies can be tempted to compromise agency fees; however fee generation is an important income that ensures agencies maintain a healthy cash flow to drive the business forward.

Instead of bowing to pressure to reduce or justify fees, individual agencies need to identify and communicate to their clients the ways in which they can really add value. Only then can they really focus on doing their job and making the business a success”.