HR isn't plain sailing

Daily Telegraph 17 July 2008

Margot Freeman is human resources manager at naval architecture and marine engineering consultancy, Houlder, a business that employs 65 people on five sites across the UK. Prior to that, one of her roles was as head of HR at APL Logistics, a shipping and container transportation firm with 12,000 staff and more than 200 offices in 50 countries. She has worked in HR for 24 years.

Houlder aims to grow the number of staff it employs to 100 by 2012, but it’s not easy. “Currently we have 20 staff aged 50 and above,” Freeman says. “So that is approximately one third of our current workforce who could be retiring in the next 10-15 years. To compound this, in recent year many mathematics graduates have gone into the financial services sector, when their skills could have been used within engineering as structural engineers or naval architects. This means that there is a shortage of experienced engineering staff coming through in the 30-40 age bracket.”

Yet while the current job losses in financial services could ultimately be good news for Houlder, retraining takes time. So the company, and Freeman, is being creative. “We are trying all avenues,” Freeman says, “such as internal staff recommendations, web-based recruitment and we are also working with the professional institutes, such as the Royal Institution of Naval Architects, to set up accredited graduate trainee schemes.” Freeman says it is important to read the trade press and to get on a press cuttings mailing list to find out what is happening in your sector. “You may hear of businesses that are losing staff or relocating and there may be fall out from this that you can hire.” This year, Houlder has also hired three intern students from Southampton and Newcastle in an attempt to start to grow its own talent, and it is hiring a student from Newfoundland University in January for a three-month internship. “In a global market,” Freeman says, “you need to look further a field.”

As a final tip, Freeman says people looking for a job shouldn’t be afraid to send out speculative letters and CVs. “Any good HR professional will always read these and what it does is cut out the middle man in terms of a recruitment agent. We’ve done this recently and successfully hired a project engineer who showed this sort of initiative.”

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