Are you an employer in the finishes and interiors sector that is considering recruiting people for your organisation?

I used ‘next generation’ in the headline to catch your eye. When I think about ‘next generation’ I think about people who are younger than I am, so that covers 16 to 64-year-olds and, to be fair, there cannot be any discrimination in the way organisations attract and recruit people. That said; society has developed along with workplaces and jobs and technological advances alone have brought communication speeds that the world has never had before. So, get your recruitment process wrong and a lot of people will get to know about it very quickly.

So here are some suggestions to consider when your organisation is considering recruitment, it may be useful to apply the following steps:

Step 1: Identify the organisation’s recruitment needs.

This sounds easy and it can be as simple as “we need someone to do job A”, but what is job A? How long will your organisation need an individual to do job A? Where does the role for job A fit in your current organisational structure? What are the skills and knowledge needed for an individual to competently work in job A and be effective or the organisation? Does the role have legislative mandatory requirements? There are probably many more questions to ask particularly if you are looking to fill a new role, so it’s well worth conducting a simple job analysis by listing the expected duties. If the role is new to your organisation but exists in other organisations, there are a number of
references that can be used to provide you with details of the job criteria:

  • the first is the Office for National Statistics and the Sector Occupational Classification Codes that list more than 80,000 occupations recognised in the UK; (www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/classificationsandstandards/standardoccupationalclassificationsoc)
  • then there is the National Occupational Standards (www.ukstandards.org.uk) that list the minimum level of competence for tasks within occupations, there are over 700 of these for construction occupations; and
  • if you are considering a new entrant to be trained into the role, take a look at the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education website (www.instituteforapprenticeships.org) and the Apprenticeship Standards.
    Although these standards apply to England, they will be a useful source of job criteria to organisations based and working in the other home nations. There are some brief details on the CITB GoConstruct website (www.goconstruct.org), at the time of writing it is understood this information is being updated.

Learning programme
Bear in mind if you are recruiting young people or career changing new entrants, it’s unlikely they will have all of the knowledge and experience your organisation needs. If you want the new recruit to be capable of full speed straight away expect to be disappointed. Your organisation will need an infrastructure capable of nurturing and developing the new entrant. It is no good relying totally on a training provider or throwing them in with experienced staff and expecting them to learn using the ‘sitting by Nellie’ theory.

Just paying another 50 pence an hour to a supervisor and expecting them to continue doing their day job while mentoring and coaching a new entrant does not work either. It is as important to have a programme of learning for the workplace as it is for the training environment, a good training provider will help employers with this and may provide training in coaching and mentoring skills. Your organisation will need someone with the abilities to coach and mentor new entrants of any age, someone like an ‘apprentice master’, a job role that is starting to appear in the medium and large organisations of the industry.

Read the full article with more suggestions on what to consider when your organisation is recruiting.

If you need help with recruiting, please contact FIS on 0121 707 0077 or email info@thefis.org