Recruiting and keeping staff with initiative and ideas is a significant problem for small firms, a new study has found.
Carried out by mobile phone company, Orange, the research revealed that over three-quarters of small businesses experienced difficulty in attracting talented, enterprising employees.
Of the 500 small businesses that took part in the poll, some 77 per cent said that taking on staff with initiative and creativity was either a major or a minor problem.
Keeping good employees once they were on the payroll was almost as much of a struggle.
Seven out of ten firms regarded holding onto better members of their workforces as a challenge, with over half saying that their most innovative workers tended to leave to join bigger companies.
However, just 12 per cent identified higher wages as the answer to retaining good employees. The majority felt that the nature of the job was a much more influential factor.
Martin Lyne, director of small business at Orange Business Services, said: “Unlike large companies, many small businesses lack the financial resources to attract talented people with high salary offers. And with skills shortages a concern in many industries, the challenge of finding and retaining the right people is likely to become more acute.”
Date:16 November 2007
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