Recruitment focus: Battling the skills shortage

Between them, Carillion and Balfour Beatty will recruit more than 10,000 new staff over the next year, the total a mix of replacements for people who have left, and additional staff as their businesses grow still further. As two of the largest recruiters in construction, they face the same problems as everyone else in finding skilled staff - and as their businesses grow, so the issue of finding those staff increases.

Richard Toy, head of operations for Carillion's recruitment arm SkyBlue, says it will be looking for an additional 7,500 people over the next 12 months. A forward orderbook of £19bn means there's pressure to increase the firm's 42,000 workforce still further.

It's equally demanding at Balfour Beatty, with its major projects and regional businesses alone seeking to recruit a further 800 to 900 people over the next year to join its current staff of 4,500, according to its head of HR, Vicky Skene. "There is a natural staff turnover, but the highest proportion of that number is new people for new projects."

And while both Toy and Skene agree that there's a skills shortage, their message is that they are both looking for the right people to join teams. Finding those people - and retaining them - is difficult, Skene says. "We are fishing in the same pool as everyone else, and so we have introduced a lot of internal initiatives to help."

One of the most successful is the 'introduce a friend' initiative at Birse (now part of Balfour Beatty), which involves an attractive recruitment bounty. "It has been really successful - we've even had some people introducing their friends before they have joined themselves!"

Looking for - and finding - a differentiator is a key way of attracting and keeping staff, believes Skene. "It's recognising that people don't just leave for the money. We need to help them have a sense of belonging - once we have them hooked, we need to build a relationship so they feel they belong. It sounds so best-practice, but it works!"

Developing that 'hook' is vital, agrees Toy - and much of it is to do with how a company and its workforce are led. "A lot of it is about leadership. There are a lot of site people progressing in the industry who don't have a lot of management skill."

Before working for Balfour Beatty, Skene worked in HR for the John Lewis Partnership and the police - and admits she was "shocked" at the lack of management training in the construction industry. "Construction is very similar to retail - you can progress even if you aren't academic as technical skills are really important too, and if you have the ability, you can be given the opportunity to manage at a young age. Retail has a very structured graduate programme, and construction needs that - they need a path to the top and to be equipped with the skills to get there."

Training needs to improve at the skills level too, believes Toy. "After the last recession, no one re-instigated skills training to the same extent, so now we have an ageing workforce that we can't replace." Skene also adds that the government needs to become more focused and consistent when it comes to skills training. "It does reviews, sets up an initiative, which gets going, but then often doesn't continue it - we need much more consistency."

Both say the industry needs to sell itself much better to children and parents in order to attract more recruits. "People's expectations are very different from 20 years ago," says Skene, "there's a greater emphasis on going to university, more on work-life balance, and people still see construction as rufty-tufty builders.

"But it isn't always like that - construction is innovative, every day is different, it has great job satisfaction and it is exciting - but it isn't sold well. No one talks about the creative and innovative side of it."

Carillion and Balfour Beatty both work with schools and local communities to help get the message across, but Toy says the industry needs to help excite people about a career in construction. "We aren't really promoting it - even with exciting things like the Olympics."

Both Toy and Skene think people in their 20s, 30s and 40s who are dissatisfied with their current jobs are another untapped source of new recruits. "Everyone is looking for the perfect candidate," says Toy, "but there is always some training to be done." Taking on someone who needs some development might be a leap of faith, but it is an often unexplored option, says Skene. "It might be better to accept that there may be a skills gap that you have to resource in the short-term."

Most of these options, though, are less than ideal for companies that are seeking highly trained staff right now. Resourcing that gap increasingly means looking much further afield - and it's something both have recent experience of, with Balfour recently recruiting professional staff from India, and Carillion employing South Africans.

Learning from experience

Skene says the Indian recruitment drive has been a success, but says it will take time to get things right. "We have to learn from the experience and about what makes it a success." Carillion is convinced it can find new employees overseas, and expects to employ about 1,000 over the next year, adds Toy.

But Balfour is trying other avenues too, attempting to make a career in the industry appealing to mums and non-construction people. "We have to look at bringing in people from different avenues. That means looking at the structure of jobs, and whether we can do them differently." Term-time contracts and allowing people to work only school hours are both under consideration, says Skene.

New entrants

SkyBlue is already working to bring new entrants into the industry, and has a partnership with JobCentre Plus to recruit and train long-term unemployed people. This involves a number of different agencies, particularly in more deprived areas that have high levels of unemployment.

Potential staff are interviewed by the agencies, then filtered through JobCentre Plus and then onto a SkyBlue training scheme that equips them with skills and CSCS cards. The firm also has a partnership with Remploy, and, like Balfour Beatty, also works with ex-offenders.

With much of this being driven by clients - especially in developing areas - attracting staff from diverse backgrounds is essential, but it requires site buy-in, and some site managers are wary, says Toy. "Site managers want people to give 100% all of the time, and if we need to mentor new people on site, we have to build that into things. We have to look at how we do it."