Following the removal of all Covid-19 restrictions in the UK, it has not been surprising to find that businesses in most sectors have been seeking to rebuild and expand their operations and activities. To achieve this objective, in many cases these businesses have needed to expand their workforce to replace those employees laid off during the pandemic.

Given that during the early months of the pandemic there were four applicants for every job vacancy, the expectation was that following the lifting of the Covid-19 restrictions, there would be a strong pool of candidates applying for each role being offered by these businesses. However, recent reports have indicated that the reverse situation has been the case, with many sectors witnessing a distinct and worrying shortage of workers, with the ratio of candidates to vacancy having dropped from 4:1 to 1:1. Moreover, although these challenges have been particularly highlighted in the food sector, other industry sectors have also been equally affected by worker shortages. This includes those businesses operating within the healthcare, hospitality, manufacturing, packing and logistics sectors.      

This current shortage has been caused by two main factors. The first is the difficulty foreign workers are having in securing visas to work in the UK and the second is that the current UK labour force is significantly smaller than experts had anticipated. As a consequence, the knock on effect of this worker shortage has led to shortages of stock for retailers and delays in the production and delivery of consumer products, which has had an adverse impact on business operations and profitability.

            Teamwork Partnership has been specialising in the provision of short and longer term temporary workers for clients across a range of industries and are able to provide the solution to the current worker challenges being experienced by many of these businesses, by filling their short/long term employment issues.