We're really struggling with recruitment at the moment. There seems to be a complete dearth of motivated people wanting to get trained up. For new hires I'd say we're hitting a 50:1 rate of applicants to offers for 1st and 2nd line roles. We've already lowered the bar to taking completely green people who are simply keen on learning but finding people with clear written and spoken English is a difficult hurdle for many of them.
I've been playing with the idea of opening satellite offices in other cities (Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham specifically) just so we can fill in those gaps. I'd really rather not because it adds a lot of logistical and managerial complexity to what is otherwise a fairly smooth operation.
This doesn't even begin to touch on finding consistent, reliable contractors. We have a few dozen on the books at the moment but need to significantly expand that over the next year or so. If I could find a reliable source of trainable, willing minds I'd just train them up to fill the roles... Bah.
