Xpress Recruitment supports Scotland’s visitor attractions sector - and ASVA members - in tackling staff shortages
Added: 27 Jul 2021
A leading UK recruitment firm has stepped in to help Scotland’s visitor attractions sector – a major contributor to the country’s £11 billion tourism industry – to tackle current staff shortages which have resulted from the Coronavirus pandemic and Brexit.
Thanks to a partnership between ASVA, the Association of Scottish Visitor Attractions, and Xpress Recruitment, ASVA members’ vacancies are now being promoted via tourism and hospitality staffing site Xpressjobs.co.uk.
ASVA has almost 500 individual visitor attractions in its membership, which includes a diverse wealth of sites all over Scotland – from historic castles to museums, national parks, science centres, distilleries and zoos. Its members have the opportunity to post their job opportunities on ASVA’s website free of charge and these vacancies are currently being ‘pulled through’ to the Xpressjobs.co.uk recruitment platform to be advertised there. This opens up their exposure to a much wider marketplace, maximising opportunities for them to be filled by suitable candidates as quickly as possible.
ASVA CEO Gordon Morrison said: “Scotland’s visitor attractions sector has been hit extremely hard by the COVID crisis, and although most of our members’ businesses are trading again, they face huge challenges in recovering from the impact of the pandemic. The staffing shortages the entire tourism industry is currently experiencing are of huge concern for many attractions. It’s incredibly difficult for them to build back their businesses and provide world-class visitor experiences if they don’t have a full complement of committed, talented and enthusiastic staff.
“We encourage our members to post their vacancies on ASVA’s website – and we share these details to everyone subscribed to receive our weekly jobs mailshot – so we know that all categories of attractions across Scotland have a range of posts that need to be filled urgently. Xpress Recruitment – itself an ASVA trade member – approached us with the fantastic offer of ‘pulling through’ these vacancies to its Xpressjobs staffing site to promote them there at no cost.
“The increased visibility this high-profile recruitment platform provides will vastly improve the chances of the vacancies being filled quickly, which will be incredibly helpful to attractions. The fact too that – thanks to the generosity of Xpress Recruitment – ASVA members are not having to pay to have their job opportunities featured on the Xpressjobs website is a huge benefit for them. That’s particularly appreciated at a time when so many businesses in our sector are really struggling, so we are extremely grateful to Xpress Recruitment for its very kind and extremely timely offer.”
Posting a job on Xpressjob.co.uk normally costs an employer around £20 per vacancy and the recruitment firm, which is based in Edinburgh, will post 250 job opportunities for ASVA attraction members at no charge.
Xpressjobs.co.uk – which is integrated with one of the UK’s leading in-house recruitment management platforms, Recruit Genie, and a network of other leading recruitment sites – features vacancies from most of the UK’s tourism employers to enable job-seekers to search and apply easily for an extensive range of permanent and temporary vacancies, at all levels, as soon as they are posted. Advertising a job on Xpressjobs.co.uk provides the post with a potential reach and audience of hundreds of thousands of relevant candidates, as the recruitment firm distributes it to other similar job boards within its network to ensure the employer gets the very best quality applicants for the vacancy.
Xpress Recruitment Director Paul J. Wilson said: “As a recruitment firm specialising in the tourism, hospitality, leisure and retail markets, we’re very conscious of the significant staffing challenges that exist within the whole spectrum of the tourism industry just now – particularly with regard to customer-facing roles.
“We’ve invested heavily in ensuring our Xpress Recruitment Search and Selection, Xpressjobs and Recruit Genie products provide the very best results in attracting talent in what is a very challenging market place.
“Brexit has resulted in so many posts, that had previously been filled by a cohort of talented EU nationals, becoming vacant. In addition, following furloughs caused by the pandemic, considerable numbers of people who had been employed in tourism and hospitality have now moved on from those industries, so we’ve seen a huge rise in the numbers of vacancies in both permanent and temporary roles across all the sectors we service.
“As a trade member of ASVA, we’ve been particularly aware of the very considerable challenges that attraction members are experiencing as a result of the pandemic and the added pressures they’re having to cope with because of the current staff shortages crisis in tourism and hospitality. We knew that boosting the exposure of ASVA members’ vacancies via our high-profile recruitment platform would benefit attractions and help them get their posts filled by appropriate candidates as fast as possible.
“We were really pleased to be in a position to offer this help to our fellow ASVA members and support an industry which is so vital to Scotland’s economy.”