Talent Identification in the Food Industry
Identifying talent as part of a coherent short-and-long term strategy is a pursuit that FoodEng Recruitment is an active participant in.
Food & Drink businesses contact us needing to identify talent in a proactive manner for a variety of reasons. They may be looking at succession planning, have a tender in for a contract that may need them recruiting several additional people, have a reputational issue that is preventing them from recruiting, or they may want to minimise the effects from a larger competitor recruiting their staff.
A shortage of available human talent in the Food Industry generally combined with fairly favourable market conditions means that salaries are increasing well above inflation in a number of skillsets/disciplines. This has led companies to use FoodEng Recruitment Talent Mapping services to undertake a number of activities including, Thorough audit of the relevant markets, Detailed analysis of competitors, Detailed evidential based reporting of current market rates for various skillsets.
To give an example of how a business has benefitted from our Talent Mapping services, FoodEng Recruitment worked with a small food manufacturer who were going to lose two employees (Maintenance Engineers) through retirement within the next 9 months. The business explained that as a small company operating within a highly competitive market, they worried about filling the two critical vacancies, as they believed they may be paying slightly less than the market rate.
FoodEng Recruitment worked with the business to preempt their potential recruitment headache by conducting a Talent Mapping exercise that enabled us to identify ‘value’ and focus on affordable candidates given the salary constraints we were working with. The Mapping and Research exercise we undertook enabled us to identify 11 potential candidates that had Food Industry experience and fitted the salary range.
As part of the Talent Attraction strategy, we also acted as advocates for the business, bestowing the virtues of the business over-and-above the salary offered, ensuring they came across as a desirable company to work for. This enabled us to widen the pool of candidates as we won-over candidates who wouldn't have previously considered working for the business.
We also identified alternative Talent Pools of other candidates from industries outside of the Food industry, but Industries where we had seen several Engineers make a successful transition to the Food industry.
The Talent Identification process we applied yielded a successful outcome for the customer, who recruited one of the 11 potential candidates we identified with Food Industry experience and salary expectations within what the company could offer. There was a seamless transition for the Engineer who even spent 2-weeks working alongside the retiring Engineer as part of a planned handover period.
Ultimately the business only recruited one Engineer as the other individual decided to put his retirement plans on hold. However, when he does decide to retire, the business doesn’t have to worry, as FoodEng Recruitment has a ready pool of qualified candidates, through the Talent Mapping exercise completed, which is regularly updated.
In the example above, Talent Mapping was used as a short-term solution to a particular vacancy. However, Talent Mapping can also be used as a long-term strategic planning tool, to help Food businesses make hiring decisions based on all available candidate and salary information, recruiting the right people at the right time for the right salary.
At FoodEng Recruitment we only undertake Talent Mapping activities within the markets we have a comprehensive understanding off and combine mapping activities with talent attraction and marketing awareness campaigns to widen the pool of candidates for our clients to consider.
