By Jennifer Sieg
Small businesses are increasingly worried about winning the ‘war for talent’ against larger competitors, the latest data suggests.
A report on behalf ofStarling Bank and UK Start Up Awards 2023 highlighted over half of the 1,200 small business founders surveyed were worried about access to talent over the next 12 months.
Anthony Painter, director of Policy at the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), said: “It’s little surprise that small businesses are struggling to win the talent war.”
Office for National Statistics (ONS) data showed nearly a million UK job vacancies in December, but some small businesses are looking to ramp up recruitment.
CMI polls suggest 33 per cent of SMEs are looking to recruit over the next six months, Painter said, compared to just 25 per cent of larger organisations.
“In such a tight labour market, SMEs need to cast their net as wide as possible and understand that any potential employee is choosing them just as much as they are choosing a new hire,” Painter added.
“The truth is that some start-ups tend to hire in their own image.”
In order to stand out in leadership, Painter said diversity is key to building a successful team.
He added: “The best leaders – including those leading small businesses – grow their talent pool by tapping into people who see the world a bit differently from them.
“That could mean people who come from different economic or educational backgrounds, bringing in people from underrepresented communities, or increasing the number of women in their organisation.”
JP Caffery, founder and chief executive of talent acquisition platform, RAMP.Global, said the key to improving access to talent as a small business is maintaining an “agile approach” when recruiting.
“It certainly shouldn’t be ‘one size fits all’ whereby there’s different needs from individuals and I think if you’re hiring you need to have an agile approach in terms of how you bring those people in,” he said.
It’s just as important for small businesses to consider creativity when it comes to offering unique benefits, whether it be working flexibility or growth within the company, given that it’s “more or less an impossibility” to rely solely on salary while competing with larger firms, Caffery said.
“The reality is though, unless you hit a certain size, trying to compete on salary alone is more or less an impossibility when you’ve got many, many of the bigger organisations out there,” he added.
