ES Steel Solutions have a busy recruitment function touching many businesses across our market sectors, in areas such as sourcing, onboarding, training and talent pipeline management. We pride ourselves on hiring an excellent on-site workforce whose certifications and credentials meet high industry standards.
So, how do we confront industry-wide challenges and outpace our competitors?
Operating primarily within the nuclear and defence sectors, ES Steel Solutions manages a range of lengthy onboarding processes for clearance sites, skill shortages, and industry bias. We have a key core team that works collaboratively to tackle these sector specific processes and continuously provide a skilled work force for our clients. To do this, our approach involves strategic pipelining and adopting a “hiring for potential” mindset.
Hiring for Potential
The changing face of the workforce and the reduced number of new entrants in the nuclear and defence sector, poses recruitment hurdles for ES Steel and the broader industry alike. Using the LFT (Labour Forecasting tool – ECITB), it highlights that an extra 13,000 workers will be needed by 2028 in the nuclear sector. This is why ES Steel Solutions has adapted a learning and training culture, hiring those with potential to thrive in the nuclear and defence environment. Ensuring that new hires possess the necessary qualifications, we pair them with our seasoned onsite employees, creating an environment of knowledge exchange and skill transfer. Over time this has increased our workforce and internal talent pool, allowing us to continue providing opportunities for individuals to gain industry experience and qualifications, while maintaining an industry experienced workforce on-site.
To identify candidates with the potential to thrive in our environment, ES Steel Solutions maintains strong relationships between our onsite and office teams, facilitating referrals, recommendations, and thorough candidate vetting processes, including additional interviews with our Site Managers.
Pipelining
Pipelining is key to the success of ES Steel Solutions recruitment, particularly given the extensive compliance processes associated with the onboarding processes. With the average onboarding duration of 8 weeks, we ensure our clients only experiences the latter half of this onboarding delay, with skilled employees ready for site inductions in under 4 weeks. This is achieved by maintaining a pipeline of pre-referenced, DBS-checked, and administratively prepared candidates near the end of the onboarding process. This ensures that when new opportunities or labour requests are posed to ES Steel Solutions, we can mobilise our skilled workforce on site much quicker than other organisations in this industry. Our pipeline consistently includes both experienced industry professionals and individuals hired for their potential, reinforcing our commitment to a culture of learning and development and helping to address the ongoing shortage of skilled labour.
As a bridge between new entrants and the nuclear/defence industry, pipelining and streamlined onboarding, and continuously providing a skilled workforce to our clients, ES Steel Solutions remains a leading and highly skilled installation expert in the nuclear and defence sectors.
Written by Rebecca Ford, Resource and Social Value ESG Lead
