For a whole range of reasons, recruiting decent, professional, front line security officers is increasingly difficult in the UK.
This year’s increase in the legal minimum wage has caused problems. Security companies could not have imagined a 9.8% hike for workers aged over 21, and suddenly what was a fairly decent hourly pay rate just 12 months ago, is the legal minimum. Clients don’t want to pay more, and very few security companies factored such an unexpectedly high salary increase into their standard service contracts.
As a result, what should have been a “minimum wage” is sadly almost the industry standard pay rate for many providing basic guarding services.
With security officers in such high demand, and pay rates in most sectors now so close, finding those engaged security officers is more challenging than ever before. So what do you do?
Job fairs
are a sole destroying experience for the poor HR or operations manager tasked with running the company stall. At the last one I attended, the one and only enquiry came from a decent looking chap, 10 minutes before the end of the event. He looked the part, came across well, and it wasn’t until I asked him what he had been doing for the last 5 years, when his answer, “I’ve just served 15years in HMP Bellmarsh”, underlined just what a waste of time these things are.
Job Centres
seem to have decided early on, that the security industry is easy money for the desperate, troubled, feckless, and disinterested, and have for the last two decades, been encouraging anyone and everyone that can’t do anything else, to look at the security industry. Even to the extent that they sometimes fund SIA training courses and licence applications. Now, I know that not everyone that has joined the industry via this route, is a walking disaster. Indeed, some have turned out to become very good security officers. Just not very many.
Back in the day, local and national newspapers had huge jobs sections with available positions for hundreds of different roles. Replacing them these days is by far the largest recruitment tool for any employer, the internet.
Online Recruitment
There is a wealth of online recruitment services to choose from. Total Jobs, CV Library, Reed Employment to name just a few. For many years, the most popular with the UK security industry has traditionally been the “Indeed” platform.
I have used indeed, on numerous occasions. Yes there is a galaxy of vacancies to choose from, but frankly, a security professional looking for any kind of front line, or even managerial physical security role is going to find navigating the site a headache.
Indeed suffers from the need to be generic. Trying to be a one size fits all recruitment solution, makes finding the type of security work you need, a time consuming struggle. All the filters and parameters in the world do not make it any easier. Typing “security” in to the search bar means you will be bombarded with pages and pages of ads for “Cyber security” professionals or “information security” experts. Good luck finding anything that resembles the work you’re looking for.
Thankfully, now there is an alternative. An industry specific job board. A job board that presents the most important features of every physical security role front and centre. A service that has become so successful, so rapidly, that the overwhelming majority of UK security companies now post their jobs on it.
That service is GuardHire.
GuardHire
is accessed via the UK’s biggest FREE security industry app, GuardPass, and has been downloaded over 300,000 times! The GuardPass app has a wealth of useful features and it has recently won the Security Buyer Magazine, Security Software of the year award! Amazingly it currently has over 170,000 registered security jobseekers. All of these potential new employees, can have alerts send instantly to their phones, the moment a suitable local job is posted on the service. This leads to FAST applications, from engaged security professionals from the areas in which you are recruiting.
Best of all, it has been set up by security professionals that understand your recruitment problems, and it provides some massively useful and time saving features. My favourite is the ability of all registered job seekers to record a 20 second introductory video, available to all recruiters. There is a huge amount of information that can be gathered in 20 seconds, and it greatly assists in rapid shortlist creation, massively reducing the need for face to face interviews. GuardHire also performs integrated SIA licence checks for all registered applicants. More time saved. Recruiters can actively search through stored CVs to find candidates with the skills and knowledge that they need, or just post an ad and wait (Well, for a few minutes at least!) for the applications to arrive.
GuardHire quite simply:
- Produces more applicants per job than any other online platform.
- Produces faster responses than any other online platform.
- Has a better standard of applicant, as all have downloaded the GuardPass app, are engaged security professionals, and have had their SIA licences verified.
- Saves more time, by allowing you to search for candidates, using a variety of sensible, security specific parameters, and review video introductions for applicants and potential candidates!
Have a look at how GuardHire works for the HR team at CIS Security: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNPhbhNUeiA
I have an operations management background, and personally worked for two security companies that adopted GuardHire as their recruitment solution, and they have never experienced such great results.
Still have doubts about just how good the GuardHire system is? Just book a FREE, no obligation, online demo, from one of our expert sales team. Drop them a line at: info@guardpass.com
#FOMO? So don’t miss out!
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