Recruitment – but not as you know it! | Shergroup delivers Smartworking Solutions | Shergroup

**Are your recruitment practices moving with the natural evolution of work…or are you losing out on the best talent to your competitors?**

We have seen a significant correlation with the quality of our talent pool and adopting the idea of working where you want to live, as opposed to living where you need to work. We’re not the only ones who have observed this, the US has seen massive growth in the ‘Gig Economy’. And closer to home, you only need to log a few calls with BT to realise, their teams are dispersed far and wide across the country.

For many of our candidates, this one of the most influential considerations when searching for their next role.

In the UK we are seeing a real change to managing clients with dispersed teams and in fact, when we have been successfully running this sort of model since 2004. Our in-house SHERPA platform and set up allows us to utilize the skills of enforcement and security professionals from their home bases without demanding they come back to an office. In 2014 we took this model a step further to allow our support teams to also work as dispersed teams. We have the technology in place to allow us to do this and as it is our back office has been offshore since 2005.

Did this have a negative impact on productivity?

Quite the contrary, we see a marked reduction in absences, adhoc requests for days off, etc. and an increase not only in the quality of output but also the commitment shown to our company. Evident in the fact that many members of the team have been with Shergroup for more than 10 years.

We have been exploring ways to grow our dispersed teams across our 3 territories, being the UK, US and India. A dispersed team gives us access to a global talent pool and we are very excited about that. We are taking on board the insight from The Smart Working Revolution on how to manage this emerging way of working. Only this week, Ruth Gawthorpe has been discussing the lack of awareness of leaders for smart working in London. It seems that the South East is the last area to adopt Smart Working principles, possibly because they have been spoilt for choice up until now.

The South West of England and Scotland are “light years ahead” of the rest of the UK…could this be because these also happen to be some of the most rural areas and furthest away from the UK capital? To work in these areas smart working is a necessity for people who want to live in areas of natural beauty.

Shergroup’s CEO, Claire Sandbrook, is a huge supporter of the initiative, having worked from home since 1994 when she was expecting her first child. She says, “I have enjoyed the freedom to work from a home base for the last 25 years and gradually have removed the traditional office structure from our thinking as a business. What this does for people who have responsibilities as carers is enormous and it allows people who wouldn’t be able to travel to an office, to work from home, or another space adapted for their needs. For employers this widens the talent pool, and for employees and sub-contractors it widens the space they can operate in. All in all it is just a major step forward for working people. Myself and my colleagues all work where we want to live including Orlando, Florida, the west coast of Wales and Lake Windermere in Cumbria.”

Through our own successful adoption of the Smart Working model, more and more of our client community has been enlisting our help in not only finding REALLY GREAT PEOPLE to join their teams, but where possible to develop their own Smart Working model.

We truly believe that it’s the people that make your company great – they need to have the right DNA! So makes sense to ensure you give yourself every advantage to finding the BEST people for the role. Whether you’re looking for Security professionals, Enforcement professionals or Credit professionals and Support skills – (our specialties) – we focus our recruitment efforts on matching the right people to your company.