The Vacancy You Can't Fill Isn't Only A Housing Problem
If you've tried to recruit in the past year, you'll recognise the feeling. The advert goes out, applications trickle in, and your strongest candidate withdraws — not because the role was wrong, but because they couldn't make it work. Nationally, 73 per cent of firms trying to hire report difficulty. Here in North Yorkshire, that carries extra weight.
Part of it is skills. The Local Skills Improvement Plan for York and North Yorkshire, published in July, names shortages across construction, engineering, land-based and food industries, clean energy, manufacturing, health and social care and the creative sector. That isn't a gap in one corner of the economy — that's most of it.
Part of it is housing. Second-home ownership, an ageing rural population and thin transport links have priced working-age people out of the places that need them. Encouragingly, this is being addressed: the Mayor's Rural Action Plan commits to 5,000 new rural homes by 2035, within a wider blueprint of 60,000 across York and North Yorkshire. One caveat matters, though. Those homes will only ease our recruitment if developers genuinely deliver the affordable element rather than negotiating it away. Volume alone won't make this district viable for the people we're trying to employ.
But neither fully explains it — and that's the hopeful part. Some of the talent we say we can't find is already here.
This is precisely why the Chamber has shaped its recent programme the way it has. July's meeting, People Before Perceptions: Unlocking the Talent You Never Knew You Needed, put the question squarely to members. September's session on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace picks up the thread on 14 September, covering the legal ground alongside how local organisations have made their own approach work. These aren't abstract topics chosen at random; they're the practical response to what members keep telling us.
Three things worth doing now:
Look again at who you're screening out. Neurodivergent candidates are often lost at interview, not because they can't do the job but because the interview tests something the job never asks for. Sending questions ahead or setting a practical task costs nothing and changes who succeeds. The same holds for disabled applicants, where Access to Work funds adjustments; for veterans leaving service with genuinely transferable discipline and training; and for people with past convictions, who many employers report as among their most loyal recruits. Charities know these communities well — that reach is a real asset in a tight market.
Grow your own. Recruiting a finished professional into a housing market like ours is slow and costly. Training someone already rooted here is neither. Apprenticeships, upskilling and secondments cost less than a failed search, and the LSIP exists to align local college provision with what employers actually need.
Use your collective voice. No single organisation can build a house or hold a developer to its commitments. Businesses and charities responding together to local plan consultations can. Housing policy isn't somebody else's file; it's your recruitment strategy ten years from now.
None of this is instant. But it's August, the district is at its best, and there is no better moment to talk this over properly — which is rather the point of the Chamber and BID Annual Social on the 10th. Long evenings, good company, and a genuinely strong hand to play. Enjoy the summer; there's good work waiting for us in September.
