Is flexible working the answer to Gloucestershire's recruitment woes?

Recruitment is one of the biggest challenges facing business in Gloucestershire.

I hear that everywhere I go from the smallest engineering firm to the NHS - now our biggest employer.

I have always believed that good people are the linchpin of any business.

But we are failing to get to grips with some of the real recruitment issues, which if sorted will lead to higher productivity and increased profitability.

That is why the new draft Local Industrial Strategy just out from GFirstLEP, the local enterprise partnership for Gloucestershire, is putting so much emphasis on our county adopting far more flexible routes to employing people.

We sincerely believe that a hard look at how we employ people is a key to us becoming a “magnet” county, which will give us an edge in both attracting and retaining people to work here.

You can look at our thoughts in more detail in the Industrial Strategy by going to the GFirstLEP website here.

And the site allows you to give us your ideas on what you think of this flexible recruitment idea.

I have just hosted a Business West networking breakfast where the ideas on more flexible working was a theme creating lots of discussion.

So much so, that human resources consultant Sarah Cook from HR People Support in Cheltenham wrote to me afterwards and said:

“Just one in seven job adverts in the UK during 2018 offered any kind of flexible working.”

Not good when you consider that in 2003, the government introduced the “right to request flexible working”, which historically applied to parents and certain other carers.

Business must wake up to flexible working as recruitment in Gloucestershire becomes the no. 1 challenge for many of our businesses.