Shergroup’s recruitment division has been developed to help our community with another all-important service – finding good people in the communities we serve. Security professionals, enforcement professionals, along with credit professionals and support skills are the target skills we want to recruit for and place in our client businesses.
Our particular interest is in the idea of working where you want to live, as opposed to living where you need to work.
For many of our candidates, this is the most important aspect of finding their next role. In the UK we are seeing a change to managing clients in dispersed teams and in fact we have been running this sort of model since 2004. Our SHERPA platform and set up allows us to utilize the skills of enforcement and security professionals from their home bases without making them come back to an office. In 2014 we took this further to allow our support teams to also work as dispersed teams. We have the technology to allow us to do this and as it is our back office has been offshore since 2005.
What we have also been looking at are ways to grow our dispersed teams across our 3 territories, being the UK, US and India. A dispersed team gives us a global talent pool and we are excited about that. We are taking on board the insight from The Smart Working Revolution on how to manage this emerging way of working. Only this week, Ruth Gawthorpe has been discussing the lack of awareness of leaders for smart working in London. It seems that the South East is the last area to adopt Smart Working principles with the South West of England and Scotland being “light years ahead” of the rest of the UK. These also happen to be some of the most rural areas and furthest away from the UK capital. To work in these areas smart working is a necessity for people who want to live in areas of natural beauty.
Shergroup’s CEO, Claire Sandbrook, is a huge supporter of the initiative, having worked from home since 1994 when she was expecting her first child. She says, “I have enjoyed the freedom to work from a home base for the last 25 years and gradually have removed the traditional office structure from our thinking as a business. What this does for people who have responsibilities as careers are enormous and it allows people who wouldn’t be able to travel to work from home, or another space adapted for their needs. For employers, this widens the talent pool, and for employees and sub-contractors it widens the space they can operate in. All in all, it is just a major step forward for working people. I and my colleagues all work where we want to live including Orlando, Florida, the west coast of Wales and Lake Windermere in Cumbria.”