January 13 2022
Candice Mason from Masons Coaches is one of the expert speakers at this year’s UK Bus & Coach Conference, speaking in session 7 ‘Recruiting and retaining excellence within the bus and coach sector’. In this week’s blog post Candice writes about what attendees can expect to hear during this session on recruitment.
My name is Candice, I run Masons Minibus & Coach Hire Ltd. We are based in the Southeast and operate a mixture of school transport, private hire, day trips & holidays. I would say we are similar to any typical small family business, just trying to do our best, keep roofs over our heads and provide a great customer service. This has been made significantly more challenging as a result of the driver shortage. Having just dragged our company through the pandemic a driver shortage was the last thing we needed to deal with or were prepared for!
When CPT asked me to talk about recruitment, I thought they’d asked the wrong person! I don’t profess to being an expert. What I do profess to, is trying everything I can think of to improve this dire situation we find ourselves in and a drive to ensure the security of our future staffing needs.
During the CPT conference I will be focusing on recruitment and sharing with you that we have tried, what’s worked, and what hasn’t. I intend to focus on short term suggestions and solutions to the long-term challenge of driver recruitment. Our recently implemented trainee driver programme has been a huge success and I’d like to share with you how we pieced this together and lessons we learnt along the way.
I will be speaking alongside Karen Cooper who is Head of Stakeholder and People Engagement at Blackpool Transport and Claire McCartney, Resourcing and Inclusion Policy Advisor from CIPD, to examine the issue before discussion with delegates. If you have any interested in exploring ideas to tackle recruitment challenges in the short term and long term then please do join me!
To sign up for the conference taking place on 25 & 26 January please click here.