South: War for talent has increased threefold, says CIPD / Hays survey

The proportion of employers reporting an increase in competition for well-qualified talent has risen threefold from 20% in 2009 to 62% in 2013. That’s according to the CIPD/Hays Resourcing and Talent Planning Survey 2013, launched at the CIPD’s annual recruitment conference in London. 

The survey, which examines resourcing and talent planning strategies across private, public and voluntary sector organisations, found that six in ten organisations had experienced difficulties filling vacancies in the past year. Managerial and professional vacancies are the hardest ones to fill (52% of organisations reported difficulties), followed by technical specialists, particularly in the manufacturing and production sector (46% of organisations overall reported difficulties in this area, compared with 57% in the manufacturing and production sector).

The survey shows that the rate of labour turnover has declined steadily since the start of the financial crisis in 2008, and one in six organisations reported that an absence of applicants has contributed to recruitment difficulties.

Ksenia Zheltoukhova, research associate at the CIPD, comments: “Although our Labour Market Outlook survey found that the low-skilled jobs market is a battle ground for job seekers, with more than 40 applicants per vacancy, our annual resourcing survey shows that employers still struggle to find talent that is well qualified.

“As well as building a strong employer brand and thinking creatively about attraction and recruitment strategies in order to attract passive job seekers, employers will have to widen the pools from which they recruit and develop talent, as well as creating new and varied career paths driven by a culture of lifelong learning. For example, employers are increasingly appointing less-qualified candidates and building their capacity to develop skills internally.”

The survey finds that most common approaches for addressing recruitment difficulties were to up-skill existing employees for hard to recruit for positions and to recruit candidates from a different sector.

The research report is available here.