{"id":41399,"date":"2024-06-04T07:35:08","date_gmt":"2024-06-04T07:35:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.guardpass.com\/resources\/?p=41399"},"modified":"2024-06-04T07:37:59","modified_gmt":"2024-06-04T07:37:59","slug":"smart-security-recruitment-in-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.guardpass.com\/resources\/smart-security-recruitment-in-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cSmart\u201d Security Recruitment in 2024."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

For a whole range of reasons, recruiting decent, professional, front line security officers is increasingly difficult in the UK.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year\u2019s increase in the legal minimum wage has caused problems. Security companies could not have imagined a 9.8% hike for workers aged over 21, and suddenly what was a fairly decent hourly pay rate just 12 months ago, is the legal minimum. Clients don\u2019t want to pay more, and very few security companies factored such an unexpectedly high salary increase into their standard service contracts.

As a result, what should have been a \u201cminimum wage\u201d is sadly almost the industry standard pay rate for many providing basic guarding services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With security officers in such high demand, and pay rates in most sectors now so close, finding those engaged security officers is more challenging than ever before. So what do you do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Job fairs<\/strong> <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

are a sole destroying experience for the poor HR or operations manager tasked with running the company stall. At the last one I attended, the one and only enquiry came from a decent looking chap, 10 minutes before the end of the event. He looked the part, came across well, and it wasn\u2019t until I asked him what he had been doing for the last 5 years, when his answer, \u201cI\u2019ve just served 15years in HMP Bellmarsh\u201d, underlined just what a waste of time these things are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Job Centres<\/strong> <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

seem to have decided early on, that the security industry is easy money for the desperate, troubled, feckless, and disinterested, and have for the last two decades, been encouraging anyone and everyone that can\u2019t do anything else, to look at the security industry. Even to the extent that they sometimes fund SIA training courses and licence applications. Now, I know that not everyone that has joined the industry via this route, is a walking disaster. Indeed, some have turned out to become very good security officers. Just not very many.

Back in the day, local and national newspapers had huge jobs sections with available positions for hundreds of different roles. Replacing them these days is by far the largest recruitment tool for any employer, the internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Online Recruitment<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There is a wealth of online recruitment services to choose from. Total Jobs, CV Library, Reed Employment to name just a few. For many years, the most popular with the UK security industry has traditionally been the \u201cIndeed\u201d platform.

I have used indeed, on numerous occasions. Yes there is a galaxy of vacancies to choose from, but frankly, a security professional looking for any kind of front line, or even managerial physical security role is going to find navigating the site a headache.

Indeed suffers from the need to be generic. Trying to be a one size fits all recruitment solution, makes finding the type of security work you need, a time consuming struggle. All the filters and parameters in the world do not make it any easier. Typing \u201csecurity\u201d in to the search bar means you will be bombarded with pages and pages of ads for \u201cCyber security\u201d professionals or \u201cinformation security\u201d experts. Good luck finding anything that resembles the work you\u2019re looking for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thankfully, now there is an alternative. An industry specific job board. A job board that presents the most important features of every physical security role front and centre. A service that has become so successful, so rapidly, that the overwhelming majority of UK security companies now post their jobs on it.

That service is GuardHire.

GuardHire<\/strong><\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

is accessed via the UK\u2019s biggest FREE security industry app, GuardPass,<\/strong><\/a> and has been downloaded over 300,000 times! The GuardPass app has a wealth of useful features and it has recently won the Security Buyer Magazine, Security Software of the year award! Amazingly it currently has over 170,000 registered security jobseekers. All of these potential new employees, can have alerts send instantly to their phones, the moment a suitable local job is posted on the service. This leads to FAST applications, from engaged security professionals from the areas in which you are recruiting.

Best of all, it has been set up by security professionals that understand your recruitment problems, and it provides some massively useful and time saving features. My favourite is the ability of all registered job seekers to record a 20 second introductory video<\/strong>, available to all recruiters. There is a huge amount of information that can be gathered in 20 seconds, and it greatly assists in rapid shortlist creation, massively reducing the need for face to face interviews. GuardHire also performs integrated SIA licence checks for all registered applicants. More time saved. Recruiters can actively search through stored CVs to find candidates with the skills and knowledge that they need, or just post an ad and wait (Well, for a few minutes at least!) for the applications to arrive.

GuardHire quite simply:<\/p>\n\n\n\n