Are you having difficulties in securing great utilities talent? You’re not alone. With over 310,000 additional workers forecast to be needed in the energy and utilities sector by 2030 to support high projected growth, many organisations are struggling to ramp up their processes and to recruit the right talent.

Using a specialist utilities recruitment agency can help increase your chances of securing great talent. In this article, Consult Energy’s Director Joseph Hewitt discusses how engaging the expertise and experience of a utilities recruitment agency like Consult Energy can make all of the difference.

How can a specialist utilities recruitment agency help your hiring?

Understanding the utilities hiring market

The utilities market is facing many acute hiring challenges, from skills shortages and an ageing workforce to difficulties in recruiting younger workers. The sector has been in continual flux in recent years, affected by governmental and industry regulations, changing supply and demand, an evolving technology landscape, utility companies going under due to debt and much more. This means that companies within the industry are continuously facing new challenges. By focusing their time and efforts on the utilities sector, recruitment consultants in specialist utilities-focused agencies have a deep knowledge and level of insight into the issues companies like you are facing.

More significantly, these agencies help organisations overcome these problems every day by utilising their knowledge and extensive experience to advise and implement tailored hiring strategies. This can include consulting on compensation packages and employee value propositions, creating recruitment campaigns to target certain workers, and more, in order to successfully engage, secure and hire great employees. 

Being aware of market rates

As specialists within utility recruitment, we talk with utility talent daily. We find out their current compensation packages, what rates they’re looking for, and ultimately what offers from businesses they take. Therefore, consultants from specialist utilities recruitment agencies are uniquely positioned to offer accurate market mapping exercises. This means that they can advise you on how to best benchmark your compensation and benefits package against your competitors, making it easier for you to adjust your offering and attract the right talent.

Accessing an extensive candidate pool

A major advantage to working with a specialist utilities recruitment agency is their large diverse pools of candidates. For most organisations, when you place a job advert on a job board, you will likely only get access to active candidates looking for work in that moment. However, when you work with a specialist recruitment agency, you will have access to a much wider pool of passive candidates too, which make up around 45% workers. From Test Assurance Managers to Metering Analysts and more, utilities recruiters have thousands of active and passive candidates on their systems.

Recruiters will also work to headhunt in order to find the best candidates for you, by looking at the talent in businesses similar to yours. Part of their job is knowing where the best talent is and if they’d be open to joining your organisation.

Improving efficiencies

If you do not regularly hire new team members, particularly niche skilled utility professionals, you may be underestimating the amount of administration that goes into a recruitment process. Between sorting through mountains of CVs (often from underqualified or completely unsuitable candidates), to booking in interview slots, providing interview feedback and chasing references, there is a lot of time-consuming administrative tasks that a team who aren’t utilising the services of a recruitment agency have to cope with on top of their regular tasks and responsibilities.

Unless you have a dedicated talent team in your organisation, these responsibilities may go to hiring managers, admin staff or other back office team members. All the admin associated with recruitment can be burdensome and cause operational delays in your organisation. Furthermore, if you are undertaking large projects such as expanding your operations to a new region, you may need to hire multiple individuals with varying skillsets and experience levels. Having to recruit multiple employees is often unmanageable for organisations without a dedicated hiring team, making outsourcing recruitment and hiring tasks a necessity for the continuity of business operations.

Knowing how to attract the best candidates

Specialist utilities recruitment agency consultants talk to candidates daily to understand what they are looking for in their next employer and role. They understand pain points, priorities for a new company/role and can offer you real insights into how to attract the talent you need.

For example, the utility industry needs to attract newcomers to the industry to replace the high level of retirees (predicted to be around 17% of the current workforce) by 2030. Using a specialist recruitment agency could help you improve your employer brand, ensuring that your employer value proposition is attractive, and implemented correctly in a fair recruitment process. Doing so, would mean that you have as many people interested in your role as possible to secure the best talent.

Providing a variety of services and solutions

Recruitment agencies offer a wide variety of services and solutions to suit your needs. This includes offering solutions such as:

• Permanent recruitment
• Contract recruitment
• Contingent search
• Retained search

They are also able to take on as much or as little of the recruitment process as needed, supporting all of your workforce requirements or just a selection. Whether your organisation wants support in improving your employer brand, performing initial scoping calls, arranging and recording 1^st stage video interviews or handling the entire process from candidate sourcing to onboarding, recruitment agencies will tailor their services to your exact needs, providing a uniquely crafted recruitment campaign.

Providing interim professionals

If you are searching for a permanent team member but urgently need to fill the skills gap, you don’t have to rush to hire a permanent team member for the sake of having someone in place quicker. Specialist utilities recruitment agencies have access to trusted contractors who can step in and keep a project afloat, ensuring operations run smoothly by taking on new projects or BAU tasks. Often, recruitment agencies have long-standing relationships with contractors who continually provide an excellent level of service to their clients. Therefore, the agency continues to engage with them and knows whether they are immediately available or not. This means that if you need urgent talent to fill a gap in your business, a speciality utility recruitment agency will be able to recommend a contractor you can trust.

Looking for great utilities talent? Look no further.

Consult Energy is a specialist recruitment agency, with extensive networks of candidates and a deep understanding of the utilities market. We have provided tailored service to house names and well-known organisations through to start-ups and SMEs. If you’re looking for advice on how to attract and secure the best talent in the industry, please get in touch with our team here.