In a paradoxical development, the UK’s manufacturing industry’s growth has slipped to a five month low, whilst hiring has been the most active in the past two years. The industry has hovered on the borderline between growth and contraction for a considerable time, with a reading of 51.7 in August, dropping from 51.9 in July – and 50 is the point at which growth slides into contraction, so manufacturing is still teetering on the edge.
Why the recruitment burst?
Medium and larger manufacturers are seeing an expansion that isn’t happening for small-scale producers, and this is creating some optimism about the year ahead. Both domestic and overseas orders are arriving, even if clients are being cautious about their needs.
This is the perfect time for industries that have been in the hiring doldrums to build new strategies around recruitment, based on two key pillars:
- Repeatable talent acquisition
- Viewing recruitment as an ongoing strategy, not a short-term task, allowing you to find talent and to keep it.
Steps to successful recruitment
- Recognising potential future needs – identify your best and worst hiring scenarios and be prepared to spot the trends in each direction
- Defining hiring goals – just filling a job is not enough, how should the person contribute to the current and future success of your company?
- Creating talent pipelines – local colleges, networking organisations, trade associations – all these can help you identify talent, as can your recruiter, calling on their candidate database software
- Designing repeatable systems – test your processes and be sure they are robust
Call on first class recruitment CRM for agencies to manage the entire hiring process. Recruitment software for small agencies saves time and increases productivity, whilst complex hiring demands can be met by using an applicant tracking system UK, to streamline job requisition and posting, to automate initial candidate matching, maintain contact with individual candidates, and simply on-boarding.
Once you have systems in place, and software to suit, you can be confident that whatever your hiring needs, even if recruitment is in abeyance due to tricky economic conditions, you’ll be in the perfect position to support your organisation’s growth at the right time, in the right way.
