If you want to source skilled workers that are perfectly aligned with your business needs, you’ll need to first adopt a strategy. Long before you actively start looking for talent at home and abroad [1], you should be identifying your company’s weaknesses and considering the ways that recruitment can essentially fill those gaps.
ChartHop notes four steps to identifying skills gaps within an organization [2] and at the top of the list is a skills gap analysis. This involves reviewing your company’s goals and taking note of any blockers. Let’s say you have a marketing team that’s excellent at sending out press releases, booking advertising space, and creating billboard campaigns.
However, one of your company’s founding aims is to be innovative and embrace new ideas. This analysis highlights your company’s strength in traditional marketing methods but also highlights the need for more innovative solutions that could help you align with competitors e.g. exploring social media marketing.
How to Identify Skills Gaps in Your Business
Once you’ve identified there’s a lack of social media marketing going on, you can take an inventory of your employees and their skills. This can be done by looking through old performance reviews and, if possible, talking to line managers. Anyone with the necessary skills to plug this gap should be utilized. If no one can fill that gap, you may need to go on the search for skilled workers. Before you do that, it’s important to complete the other three steps, which are:
- Talk to managers about their teams and, in turn, how they feel things within their department are.
- Collect data from your employees, such as data from their CVs and the recent work they’ve produced. You can also create a survey and get employees to rate their own skills.
- Talk to your employees so you can tell them your needs. This opens discussions about whether people feel they can help and, moreover, if they want to take on a new role.
Going through these steps should help you identify the skills gaps in a business. You can double down on confirming your assessment is correct by talking to recruitment agents. They understand the jobs market, what types of skills companies in your sector are searching for and the types of skills candidates have. Recruitment experts can also help you navigate systems such as the UK’s skilled worker visa program. Finding candidates from countries outside of the UK is a skill you can delegate to an agency.
Mastering the Skill of Recruitment
Another skill that’s worth delegating is the legal side of recruiting skilled workers, particularly from abroad. Having a basic understanding of the skilled worker visa program is essential if you want to take your recruitment drive to an international level. As noted by immigration lawyers at Reiss Edwards, the program sets out the minimum requirements employers and employees need to meet. For example, candidates need to have a qualification equivalent to RQF Level 3 [3]. Additionally, as an employer, you need to offer a salary of at least £26,200.
So, once you’ve mastered the skill of identifying gaps in your company and know your options with regard to recruiting workers from home or abroad, you can lean on the expertise of lawyers to complete the process. The point of all of this is that you can only bolster your company’s ranks with skilled workers if you master the skill of recruitment.
This guide should get you started, but being proactive is key. Talk to members of staff, analyze available data, and familiarise yourself with the nuances of recruiting new employees. Keep this proactive ethos in mind and you can find the right people to plug the skills gaps in your business.
Further Reading:
- Click here to read more about skilled worker recruitment drives in the UK.
- Click here to read more about the four steps to finding skills gaps.
- Click here to learn more about RQF qualifications.
