Vicky, it would help if you indicated the geographical areas(s) that concern you, since any tightening of markets is not likely to be national but local.....

Hi Vicky, we are an online retailer based in Faversham in Kent. We also experience challenges when it comes to recruiting Warehouse Operatives. As an entry level role, we pay minimum wage but offer a £500 attendance bonus just before Christmas.
We tend to find the staff we recruit are currently unemployed, are working unsociable retail hours, on zero hour contracts or want a foot in the door. We find people tend to stay in the role between 1.5-2 years before they look at moving on or in to another department.
However, we work hard to challenge and keep our staff motivated through having a skills matrix and a good training programme to enable them to be multi-skilled throughout the warehouse. We also offer some of our senior operatives the opportunity to gain an NVQ in warehousing. I hope this has helped in any way?

HI Vicky
We have a warehouse in Manchester for all distribution in UK and it is so difficult to recruit we actually have open positions at the moment that we can't fill and are using temp workers to get us through to the New Year. The last temp we took on we ended up keeping him, but its rare that happens. I think we offer good T & C's we pay well above the living wage, have a quarterly bonus scheme based on KPI's which has always been paid out in full, higher ER pension contributions, good holidays, training opportunities and NVQ's. The problem we face is that in the area we are based there are a lot of other Companies big name Companies and that it was the problem. Candidates lean towards the big brands rather than a smaller one they might not have heard of, I also think the recruitment agencies favour the bigger companies so we are left with a poorer pool to pick from
T