With the worst of COVID-19 hopefully behind us, international travel soon to resume and furlough coming to an end in the coming months, employers particularly those within the hospitality and cleaning sectors are hiring again but the impact of COVID and Brexit is starting to be felt and is now a new challenge to be overcome.
A skills shortage has been seen for years across these sectors and by 2019 this was widely accepted as a labour crisis, add to that that almost 300,000 people in the hospitality sector have left their jobs since March 2020 including cleaning operatives, kitchen porters and housekeeping personnel and you can see why cleaning companies and hospitality businesses are struggling to find staff.
Migrant workers made up to 37% of the English cleaning workforce pre COVID and Brexit but with new sponsor licences being required to employ from outside the UK now along with a minimum salary of £25,600, this reduces the pool of candidates available for jobs that do not pay this.
The national living wage in the UK is £8.91 yet based on a person working 37.5 hours a week, they would need to be being paid in excess of £13.00 an hour to be eligible for the immigration system and with there still being a stigma to many Brits of working as a cleaner. the question remains how do cleaning companies ensure they can continue to recruit effectively allowing them to deliver the best service possible?
If COVID has shown us anything, it is how important cleaning is and what a value professional cleaning is to be businesses and society as a whole and that is why here at USS we educate and encourage our clients to value the service that our operatives deliver allowing us to pay above the national living wage when possible.
In addition to this, we offer part time vacancies in addition to full time, hours and shifts that suit individual circumstances, a range of training programmes and personal development, an employee of the month and refer a friend scheme and promotion from within. In fact lots of our operatives have gone on to be supervisors and on some occasions beyond that to managerial positions.
If you’d like to find out more about working for USS, we’re recruiting now so why not get in touch to discuss what opportunities are available.
