Adam Grainger, Global Head of Energy and Engineering, Networkers International plc
The renewable energy industry is growing rapidly as are the number of people employed within it. In order to give your business a competitive edge, it is becoming increasingly important to ensure you have appropriately skilled and motivated individuals within your organisation to compete effectively in the global renewable energy market place.
With the day to day responsibilities of most hiring managers in the energy industry focussed elsewhere, it can be hard to dedicate the necessary time to recruit staff. If you get it wrong, and you are forced to replace an individual, the costs to your business can be vast. A recent study concluded that the cost of replacing an employee could be anything from 75 percent of the person’s salary to an alarming 24 times the person’s salary! So how do you go about identifying the right individual first time round?
Identify your resource needs
Before hiring a new member of staff it is important that you consider the skills your business will need in order to function properly and complete the tasks at hand. In a growing industry, such as renewable energy it is important to ensure you have the right amount of suitably skilled individuals to ensure the growth of your business keeps pace with the industry and that of your competitors. A combination of resource and succession planning will allow your business to identify upcoming skills gaps that need to be filled or areas of risk if an individual were to leave the organisation. If this is carried out regularly and effectively it should allow you enough time to make the necessary arrangements to bring in new members of staff.
However, we do not live in a perfect world where everything goes to plan. Should disaster strike, it may be worth considering an interim solution such as an external consultant, with enough experience and skill to come in to your business and ‘hit the ground running’. On the face of it, freelance consultants may seem expensive however the cost of failing to deliver may be far higher. An interim solution will afford you the time to carry out a well measured recruitment campaign ensuring you hire the right long term replacement.
Skills and personality specification
In order to hire the right person it is imperative you identify the skills and experience required as well as the personality traits best suited to your organisation and the job at hand. Taking the time to write a comprehensive job description can save you long hours interviewing unsuitable or uninterested candidates later. A good job description should include information covering the day to day tasks of the role, the prerequisite level of skills and experience required, as well as the character traits required to succeed in the role.
