Boom times ahead for Guernsey’s Construction sector but have you got the people you need?

 

By Emma Holliday, Rest of the World Director, GR8 Recruitment

One of the problems facing businesses, especially in the construction industry, is being able to find a reliable source of workers, whether they are skilled or otherwise. With our tight employment market, businesses have been looking beyond our shores, but with that comes delays.

Guernsey’s strict immigration laws mean that the process of recruiting employees from outside the Common Travel Area can take anything up to 15 weeks from the time when someone is recruited to them starting on site or in a business.

Waiting that long for new staff can be costly, so we have adapted our approach to recruitment to cut out time wasted and provide you with the employees you need who can start, in most cases, within one to four weeks.

Since GR8 Recruitment was founded in 2018, we have been working in Kenya and other countries in East Africa, and more recently the Caribbean, to find suitably qualified and skilled workers supplying several sectors including construction, hospitality and early years care. Through our extensive network and our experience of swiftly processing all the necessary paperwork and checks, we can provide you with a head start by being able to employ people quickly from our bank of skilled and experienced staff.

We currently have over 30 permits approved for overseas construction workers who could be on-site between one and four weeks from now. We have created this bank of employees so that you don’t have to wait up to four months for all the paperwork and permissions to be approved. If you know that you need tradesmen or labourers for a project, GR8 may have already recruited them, made all the necessary checks and have the work permits in place. It should only take between one and four weeks to have people working on site.

This will cut out the time needed for work applications to go through, providing your business with the right people when you need them, solving the local skills gap that is affecting growth in Guernsey.

We pride ourselves in being able to support industry by getting the right people, giving our clients peace of mind that all of those we recruit have been thoroughly checked and prepared for work in the island, including being prepared for and meeting the Work Safe guidelines.

Find out more about GR8 here