Recruiting can be difficult. Really difficult, at times. With the myriad of recruitment and selection opportunities available to hiring managers, the process can easily get costly, both financially and on the increasingly limited time resources of a HR team. You can also throw in the additional costs of training throughout an employee’s journey as they progress through their initial probation and stages of employment with your organisation.
As these demands grow, there’s now over 700,000 employees currently participating in apprenticeship training programmes in the UK. With almost 25% of new apprenticeship starts in the last year aged under 19, how can taking on a member of staff with less experience, at the start of their career journey and spending time away from the office on off-the-job training possibly help to reduce the financial and time costs involved with hiring new staff?
There’s the obvious caveat that the minimum wage for an apprentice in their first year of training is the lowest on the scale, currently at £5.28 per hour. Businesses do have the liberty to pay more than this and you no doubt have your company pay scales to factor into this as well.
With the apprenticeship training provider advertising a vacancy, screening candidates and assisting in shortlisting, the recruitment process becomes quicker and less costly from the very start.
Jan Norris, Head of People and Culture at Community Housing, elaborates “In September 2022, we recruited 6 apprentices across our trades and were pleasantly surprised when we received a total of 160+ applicants. Although this was a great testament to our reputation as a local employer of apprentices, it did present its challenges particularly in terms of the time, and therefore cost, required to sift applications and shortlist.
Knowing not only the popularity of our previous apprenticeship opportunities, but also the current popularity of electrical apprenticeships, when it came to our recent recruitment, we were looking for a way we could do things more effectively and efficiently.
The answer came through our conversations with the amazing team at Kidderminster College.
Stacy Murray, Apprenticeship Lead at the college was on hand from the very start of our recruitment, discussing our wants and needs to understand what we were looking for in an apprentice, and supporting the publication and management of the vacancy on the GOV UK Apprenticeship website.
Stacy helped to take away a lot of the stress and time investment for us, streamlining the process and making it quicker and less costly.
After the success of this experience, we will certainly be working closely with Stacy and the team at Kidderminster College again in our future recruitment for apprentices.”
Once employed, your business will be paying the salary of your new employee which includes their off-the-job training day, normally on site at the training provider’s premises. Whilst on-the-job training can always be beneficial to new employees, knowing that industry-related training is being delivered by accredited, reputable training providers does alleviate some of the pressure on your Learning and Development teams.
Danny Pardoe, Business Engagement Lead at Kidderminster College, adds “We’ve had many employers discuss their training needs with us during the apprenticeship recruitment process and more times than not, the off-the-job training provided by Tutors at Kidderminster College aligns well with the needs of the business. Employers often appreciate when their apprentices bring fresh ideas to the table. By spending one day per week with peers from other organisations during lessons at Kidderminster College, apprentices have the opportunity to develop these ideas further and then apply them back into the business.”
New employees will often bring a fresh perspective to your organisation and with the mindset of many apprentices who want to learn whilst working, an enthusiasm to contribute to your organisation is often easy to say. Learning and Development teams also see the potential to build company culture through a long-term apprenticeship recruitment process. This instillment of company culture can reach far and wide as your organisation grows with new apprentices contributing on many different levels to this.
In the construction industry alone, an ageing workforce and an increase in demand has put a massive strain on the industry with almost 225,000 new workers needed by 2027. With the need for high-quality training and the importance of futureproofing your workforce, apprenticeships will form a massive part of the solution to this challenge.
Jan Norris adds “Being an employer of choice in the local community, we’re proud to have colleagues who’ve been with us for years and even decades – some of whom started with us as apprentices and have developed into the roles they are in today, including Head of Service level.
Having long serving colleagues, particularly within the Trades side of our business, is something we are proud of, but it does present a challenge.
With an ageing workforce, a number of colleagues are approaching retirement and the succession of the business and loss of their skills and knowledge is a concern.
Investment in our apprenticeship programme means we’re able to bring in new talent and provide the opportunity for our apprentices to work alongside these colleague mentors, to learn and absorb their knowledge, with the goal of them developing and moving into the roles when those colleagues move on.
With the skills gap being a key topic over recent years, we believe our apprenticeship programme is helping us to ‘grow our own’ and fill the gaps, to ensure we futureproof our talent pipeline.
In addition, as much as our apprentices learn from our colleagues, they help us as an organisation to learn and evolve, bringing new approaches, unique ideas and helping us to question ‘Is there a way we could be doing this better/quicker/in a more cost-effective way?’.”
Cutting costs and creating culture at the same time can be done. It may require a culture change from hiring managers to see the benefits of apprenticeship recruitment but once you start on your journey of apprenticeship recruitment, you’ll be sure to continue for many years to come.