Recruiting, selecting, and keeping talented employees is a big challenge in a competitive market. Organisations are always looking for new ways to reach a wide range of candidates and, once they hire the right people, to keep them in the company.
Table of Contents
Calderworth Homes Limited is a regional housebuilder completing around 480 homes a year across Yorkshire and the North East. It employs 640 people directly, comprising site management, technical, commercial, sales and head office functions, and engages a further 1,300 operatives through subcontract. The direct workforce has a mean age of 47 and 22 per cent are within ten years of retirement. The author is Head of Resourcing. Organisational detail is illustrative and anonymised.
Introduction
House building competes for a shrinking pool of skilled labour against infrastructure programmes that pay more, in a sector whose workforce is ageing faster than it is replenished and whose reputation among school leavers remains poor. This assignment examines the factors shaping recruitment and selection at Calderworth, how recruitment is planned and justified, the approaches available for attracting and choosing candidates, and the strategies through which the business retains the people it appoints.
Task 1: Report on the factors that impact on recruitment and selection
AC 1.1 Examine the impact of regulatory and legislative frameworks on an organisation’s approach to recruitment and selection
Discrimination law. The Equality Act 2010 governs every stage of the process, prohibiting direct and indirect discrimination, harassment and victimisation across nine protected characteristics. Examining the impact in construction specifically, indirect discrimination is the most frequently engaged provision: requirements that appear neutral, such as continuous site experience or unrestricted availability for travel, disadvantage groups with caring responsibilities and cannot be applied unless proportionate to a legitimate aim. Section 60 restricts health enquiries before an offer, and the reasonable adjustment duty applies to the recruitment process itself, which for trade assessments means considering how a practical test can be adjusted without compromising its purpose.
Health and safety and competence requirements. The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 place duties on the principal contractor to ensure that anyone appointed has the skills, knowledge, training and experience for the role. Examining the recruitment consequence, competence verification is a legal obligation rather than a quality preference, and evidence of qualification and card scheme registration must be checked and recorded before site access. This constrains how quickly a role can be filled and removes the option of appointing on potential alone for safety-critical positions.
Right to work and immigration. Prescribed document or digital checks must be completed before employment begins to establish a statutory excuse against civil penalty. Examining the practical requirement, checks must be applied uniformly to every candidate, since selective application based on name or appearance is itself unlawful.
Agency and contractor regulation. With a substantial contingent workforce, the Agency Workers Regulations 2010 confer equal treatment on basic working conditions after twelve weeks in the same role, and the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations govern how agencies operate. Off-payroll working rules determine employment status for tax where individuals supply services through intermediaries. Examining the combined impact, these frameworks make the choice between direct employment, agency and subcontract a compliance decision as well as a commercial one.
Pay and employment protection. National minimum and living wage rates set the floor. The Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Act 2023 requires employers to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment, which extends to the conduct of recruitment and to the site environment a candidate is being recruited into.
ng the consequence, recruitment is on the critical path for the growth plan, and a delayed site manager appointment delays plot handovers and therefore revenue recognition. The subcontract operating model. Most trades are engaged through subcontractors rather than employed. Evaluating this factor, it transfers the trade recruitment problem to subcontractors without removing it, since a subcontractor unable to resource a site delays Calderworth’s programme just as an unfilled vacancy would. The business’s influence over the quality of that workforce is indirect and exercised through commercial relationship. Geographic dispersion and site life cycle. Sites open, run and close, so demand is mobile. Evaluating the implication, candidates must accept travel or relocation between sites, which narrows the pool and makes location a genuine selection criterion rather than an administrative detail. Employer brand. Evaluating Calderworth’s position, the business is respected locally among those who know it and largely invisible to those who do not, which suffices for experienced hires responding to a known name and fails entirely for early-career recruitment where the competition is not other housebuilders but every other sector addressing school leavers. Demographic profile. With 22 per cent of direct staff within a decade of retirement, evaluating the risk, the business faces a scheduled loss of technical judgement that cannot be replaced through external recruitment...
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