Your essential guide to being an employer of choice

It’s here: a new updated version of the essential guide to managing your workforce.

Full of tips, advice and resources, it’s ideal for small and medium-sized food & drink businesses who want to understand how to be an employer of choice in a competitive environment.

The free online toolkit is a best practice guide to attracting and managing the workforce, combining helpful checklists, guides and templates with inspiring real life stories and signposting to places to get more advice and information on each topic.

From Fair Work to flexible hours, upskilling to finding future talent, the toolkit guides through all aspects of attracting, recruiting, retaining and developing your people.

Background

The Scotland Food & Drink Partnership is behind the update and refresh of its successful Recruitment & Retention Toolkit.  It comes as part of the delivery of its recently launched strategy “Sustaining Scotland. Supplying the World.”

People and skills are one of the dominant issues across the food & drink industry, and the strategy identified this as a key enabler for growth.

The food & drink industry is the third largest sector employer in Scotland and the biggest manufacturing employer. However, the sector continues to experience significant staffing shortages due to a combination of labour supply challenges, fierce competition from other industries, and a scarcity of skills.

Iain Baxter, chief executive of Scotland Food & Drink, said: “The sector continues to experience significant staffing shortages due to a combination of labour supply challenges, fierce competition from other industries and a scarcity of skills.

“The Recruitment and Retention Toolkit is a valuable resources to support businesses of all sizes to attract and retain talent we need to be seen as an industry of choice – but this remains one of our biggest challenges.

“Getting the right people with the right skills into the sector - in the right numbers and locations - is essential to boost productivity and drive growth.

“This guide is designed to help. It’s easy to use, designed for businesses of all sizes and is focused on the day-to-day challenges in food and drink.

“We are a very resilient industry, and we will need to deploy that flexibility and fresh thinking to find and develop future talent.”

Employer voices

One of the businesses sharing their story within the toolkit is Castleton Farm, an Aberdeenshire soft fruit grower.

They outline their “Castleton Code”, which they use as a guide for their team and a way to engage with them in making a happy workplace.

“Creating a positive workplace culture is so important to us here, and the benefits we reap in an engaged and enthusiastic workforce are immense,” said co-owner Anna Mitchell. 

Other employers sharing their stories include Bryce Cunningham from Ayrshire organic dairy Mossgiel Farm, and Michelle Maddox, owner of Abernethy-based Clootie McToot, which makies clootie dumplings.

Michelle – who also appeared on Gordon Ramsay’s Future Food Stars earlier this year – says if employers want a skilled, diverse and dedicated workforce, “inclusion is the key to success”.

The employer voices can be heard across social media platforms in the next few weeks and months. The toolkit is available to download at https://bit.ly/SFD-toolkit