Recruitment and retention remain a big challenge for many UK businesses and it’s not just down to what Kwasi Kwatend described as “the low-wage, high-immigration model” (when he was Business Secretary from 2021 to 2022)

For too long, too many sectors have relied on cheap overseas labour but the more widespread challenge is the reliance on competitors to train staff who are then poached.

Sure, there has been an element of “the low wage, high immigration model” but that mainly only affected the low-wage sectors.

But the recruitment and retention challenges are not just in the low-wage sectors. This brings me to the reliance on poaching staff that your competitors have trained.

This will always be part of a recruitment strategy of a growing business but it should not be the exclusive strategy, a mixture of both experienced and home-developed talent is the ideal scenario.

We should focus more on recruiting ambitious career-minded individuals and training them – and equally importantly indoctrinating them with our culture.

This creates more effective employees, more committed employees and more loyal employees that are saturated in your organisation’s DNA as opposed to the DNA of a competitor.

The problem with poaching staff is that we can end up with too many job hoppers who are only in it for the brass. They are not a good long-term investment and can also be extremely disruptive to the rest of the organisation.

We must show career-minded candidates what a role in our organisation looks like e.g. career path, training commitment, appraisal sequence, company communication, culture, benefits etc as this is what attracts the best candidates.

I love the concept of creating an in-house training ‘academy’ to develop and create committed employees and a number of our Pabasso clients have done this with great success – you do not have to be a large organisation to do this, I have seen it work successfully where as few as 2-3 candidates have been brought in with such a training and development plan. It could be a graduate intake or it could even be supported by the government’s Modern Apprenticeship program.

Some of our larger Pabasso clients have recruited in-house recruiters to ensure they recruit the best candidates and in doing so saved thousands in recruitment fees. It also enables them to create a pool of potential candidates that they develop a relationship with and maintain contact with until they have an appropriate role for them – a bit like sports team have people on the radar ready to bring them in as required

I once was told by a senior manager of a large multinational Tech company that one of the main things he considered when recruiting was that the role had to be a career advancement for the candidate – pretty sound advice.

So given that the recruitment and retention problem (which has been exasperated by early retirees) is not likely to go away any time soon, why not think about investing in your own ‘academy’ to ensure you have a continual supply of great employees ready to help you grow? It may be one of the best investments you ever make.