Simon Telfer, HR director of Branston, a 600-strong firm that supplies Tesco with potatoes and potato-based prepared food products, said that despite more candidates in the marketplace, the company was experiencing greater difficulties in finding staff for specialist and skilled roles. These included product development staff, development engineers, process and IT network specialists, said Telfer.

“The challenge is not necessarily finding people but the right people with the right skills and experience. We find when we place an advert for a job, there is a huge response, but a lot of them don’t meet the criteria,” said Telfer.

Telfer said the reason why the company found it difficult to attract people with the skills it needed was because the food production industry had not had the demand for this level of skills before.

The need for staff with these skills was also being driven by ever increasing food safety and hygiene standards in the food industry, he said. And these difficulties were compounded because of the industry’s perception as “not the most attractive”. As a result, said Telfer, “it seems sensible to grow your own”.

Telfer said that over the last couple of years, the company had been “very successful” in identifying and developing staff at lower levels of the company with the potential to progress.

Through training and confidence building, he said that four or five of the 16 staff who had started the programme had now been promoted.