Nic Scott, CEO, Fairsail

As the UK’s unemployment rate continues to dominate the headlines, with the jobless total reaching almost 2.61 million, you would think that this would be a golden era for employers. Yet many organisations are struggling to find and recruit the best people for the job.

For example at Fairsail we have been looking to hire a team of engineers for over a year now and have struggled to find people with the full set of skills we require. While countries like India and China produce literally millions of highly skilled technical graduates, the UK struggles to produce just a few thousand. Why is this?

As a start-up we also have to compete against established engineering recruiters such as Google and Facebook who can offer the limited number of skilled UK computer science graduates starting salaries of $150,000. It can seem impossible to attract the talent we need to expand. Such is the shortage of skilled engineers that technology companies are now doing everything they can to attract talent, including offering free meals, iPads, stock options and even haircuts.

Recent comments from Lord Sugar during the final of The Apprentice highlight the feeling amongst many high profile UK businessmen. Lord Sugar suggested a finalist who had come with business idea for an online service should ‘get on a plane to America’ where there is ‘an appetite for these kind of mad, long term ideas.’ The comment was particularly worrying as it sets out a standard, not just for investors, but for those actively seeking a career in the technology industry that the UK is not a place to achieve success.

This comes at a time when the Government seems keen to support the technology industry and throw around ideas such as ‘Tech City’ and ‘Innovation Nation’, yet is doing little to develop a future workforce to support the technology industry with home-grown talent. The powers that be need to look at how they plan to provide the technical expertise that will help strengthen our economy and support innovation.

Investment in technical colleges is the first step; the Government’s current apprenticeship scheme seems to be aimed more at creating a generation of apprentice burger flippers and brick layers than analysts and coders. We need much greater support for our graduates, many of whom come out of university with a great deal of knowledge but very little experience or understanding of the workplace.

Before we can truly become a global leader in technology and engineering, as the Government hopes, we first need to become the leader in producing technically gifted and educated people.

In the meantime what can businesses do to ensure they are hiring the best? At Fairsail we have developed human resources management software which spans the total talent management continuum, including pre-hire and selection processes. Being a cloud-based solution also means we can deliver an on-demand platform for companies to access worldwide, across all offices.

The rise of social media has opened up a whole new pool of talent for businesses to search through when looking for new and talented staff. In 2012 80% of companies expect to use social media to recruit for an opening, and yet many struggle to do so efficiently. Without a well-designed process which helps businesses keep their potential employees front-of-mind, the risk is investment in luring the best candidates is being wasted in the wrong areas. At Fairsail, our social media engagement model means employers communicate steadily and consistently in the ways today’s graduates and engineers wish to be addressed, over mediums such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

While the government takes steps to improve the skills of young, the best solution is for companies to arm themselves with HR software that allows for a full sweep of the talent pool to enable them to find the small group of skilled, trained individuals they require. Now you don’t need Simon Cowell to assess the skills of your candidates or David Walliams to charm them into joining the company, you simply need a HR solution which can direct you to the best talent available.