Arms race for talent in the STEM sector will only get worse says recruiter

“THERE’S an arms race for talent in the STEM sector,” said group managing director of the Cubed Resourcing Partnership, Steven Street.

According to Engineering UK, the skills gap in the sector and associated industries is costing the country £27bn a year, and there is a current annual shortfall of 55,000 skilled workers.

Cubed, which has offices in Wetherby and Saltaire specialises in talent management in engineering, FMCG, manufacturing, electronics and supply chains, is at the forefront of this battle to close the skills gap.

Mr Street has led the firm since January this year, having seen decades of decline.

Mr Street said that Cubed and the whole industrial sector need to “put the world back in the mood to start careers in manufacturing.”

Cubed Resourcing was launched with investment from Saltaire-based set-top box developer Pace plc co-founder Rob Fleming, with Kate Hill as a founding partner.

Cubed is taking a different approach to recruitment, a massive £27.5bn industry in the UK, focusing on the search for skilled employees with long term partnerships and a consultancy role.

Mr Fleming parachuted the former Relay Recruitment managing director and head of Hunter Wolff consulting, Steven Street, in as group managing director.

Mr Street cut his teeth at various Leeds and Bradford recruitment consultancies before co-founding Relay Recruitment in 1996 and successfully exiting it in 2011.

He continued: “Normal market supply and demand is not there. Pay is driven up because of demand, and the cost of products goes up. It becomes competitive and expensive to be a business here. However we’ not trading in a vacuum. We have we’ve got to consider what our sector looks like and how it compares globally.”

The image of the sector is something that Mr Street said needs a rehaul.

He said: “We were a manufacturing force, but we outsourced it and we turned a whole generation off of a job in manufacturing.

“People see careers in STEM sectors as dirty or low paid. There is over demand for skilled people in software and design, but a chronic shortage of people and an ageing workforce in traditional skills such as milling and manufacturing.

“Let’s face it, can have the best products or services in the world but you need people with specific skills to make a business.”

He said some brands have hit the nail on the head. Jaguar Land Rover have been “leveraging their brand and seducing people to work for them”.

Similarly Mr Street used Virgin Trains as an example. “The reality of working for Virgin Trains,” Mr Street said, “is you may be serving coffee on the 7.10 to Kings Cross, but they have used their brand to attract people to work for them.”

The move towards in house recruitment is also “cannibalising” the industry, said Mr Street.

“Internat HR departments have historically been passive, but now they need to be proactive and respond to the needs of the business, becoming more like commercial recruiters. They have control over the candidate experience, and taken ownership of the recruitment function.

“This change does cannibalise the recruitment industry but we are able to trade through Cubed and to facilitate businesses taking recruitment in house.”