Manufacturing

09-December-2009

The manufacturing sector is slowly emerging from the recession but while recruiters are still being squeezed on margins as recruitment budgets remain tight, the war for engineering talent continues in earnest.

“Our two biggest graduate recruitment areas are for systems and software engineers, but we haven’t experienced any difficulty recruiting in these disciplines in the past year,” a spokesperson for BAE Systems told Recruiter. “We have had a few challenges with finding naval architects and nuclear engineers, where we have one vacancy outstanding for each.”

The spokesperson adds that finding naval architects and nuclear engineers is particularly difficult as there are few graduates entering the jobs market.

Dianne Bailey, director - HR at Cynergy3 Components, which manufactures electronic components, adds: “We have had problems finding good production staff, both unskilled and semi-skilled as well as engineers. We are happy to do the training ourselves.

“I want to work with an agency recruiting for a design or graduate engineer that actually understands the business we are in and understands our market. They don’t have to technically understand it but it is no good sending me an IT graduate when I want someone that wants to be a design engineer.”

I want to work with an agency recruiting for a design or graduate engineer that actually understands the business we are in and understands our market

The war for talent may have intensified in some areas of manufacturing but the recession has placed a greater strain on budgets and therefore on margins.

The BAE spokesperson says: “The main pressure for us, as for everyone, is that budgets are tighter. We are ensuring we can justify our costs and seek reductions. We have negotiated some discounts, but are still surprisingly seeing some inflation with advertising costs.”

And for Greg Latham, managing director at Encore Personnel, such client discounting has meant a 20% decrease in average margins but an increase in volumes. “It has replicated the same model of the last recession of the early 1990s and late 1980s. Temp volumes increased and the industry was not confident to recruit permanent workers.”

Bailey adds that the balance of power has changed on margins, whereas before recruiters had their clients “banged to rights”.

And BAE’s spokesperson says BAE Systems’ graduate and apprentice recruitment team is enhancing its recruitment offering through a
refreshed graduate website, and next year it will review its assessment centre arrangements.

But recruiters are not sitting on their hands in the recession. Latham told Recruiter that his firm was concentrating on supplying additional services to clients. “We have looked at technical skills and training. We have linked up with some local colleges for training courses prior to temporary workers starting. We have got a number of clients on the programme who are picking up on this up.”

And with signs of a recovery in the offing, Sara Frith, lead principal consultant at Scantec Personnel, who started Scantec’s manufacturing desk from scratch, sees a positive future for the sector. “I appreciate a lot of manufacturing is going overseas but I think manufacturing will continue to have a big impact on the UK and retain a big presence here.”