Car manufacturers deliver on job creation promises

Job creation announcements don’t always pan out as planned, but as car sales in the UK hit their highest level since the heady days of 2007, recruitment plans announced last year by two of the UK’s motor manufacturers are already coming to fruition.
Tue, 7 Jan 2014Job creation announcements don’t always pan out as planned, but as car sales in the UK hit their highest level since the heady days of 2007, recruitment plans announced last year by two of the UK’s motor manufacturers are already coming to fruition.

Car sales soared to 2.26m last year, a 10.5% increase on the previous year.

Following an announcement last year that Jaguar Land Rover planned to create an additional 700 jobs at new engine plant in the West Midlands, due to open in 2015, a company spokesperson tells Recruiter that around 100 roles within the operations team have already been filled.

The spokesperson says the next stage will be to recruit some of the manufacturing engineers to go into the facility: “We expect this to take place during the first quarter of the year.”

The spokesperson says that all the jobs at the new plant are advertised on a special section of the Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) website, where those interested in future jobs coming on stream can register their interest.

With the announcement last month by the Society of Motor Manufacturers that car production in 2013 was likely to be at a six-year high with more than 1.5m vehicles built, another UK car manufacturer has begun to deliver on its hiring plans.

A spokesperson for Bentley says the company recently took on the first 50 of the 400 it plans to recruit at its Crewe plant. The spokesperson tells Recruiter that the positions filled so far have been manufacturing engineers, project managers and roles involved in building the new manufacturing lines.

The company has been able to attract talent because it is an internationally known brand, adds the spokesperson.

Dean Ball, regional director at PageGroup tells Recruiter that JLR has been gearing up its recruitment over the past 12-18 months across a range of functions, both support staff as well as technical people.

Ball says that he doesn’t expect JLR to further increase its recruitment as a result of today’s car sales announcement. However, he says, “it is likely that there will be further [recruitment] activity from other UK manufacturers – Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Vauxhall”.

Ball says that recruitment agencies are seeing an increase in business as companies seek out people who can take on broader rather than niche management roles. 

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