Recruitment and Retention
We are continually recruiting through growth and establishment of new franchises. We must recruit and retain the right people in order to ensure service excellence.
We have a well-established standard process for recruiting train drivers which uses both modern psychometrics and best practice assessment centre disciplines. We run both apprenticeship and graduate schemes that allow us to develop our employees to suit our business needs. We also take part in the ATOC (Association of Train Operating Companies) development scheme for professional engineers that provides a training programme and fast-track route to becoming a Chartered Engineer.
We continue to develop our recruitment processes and are currently trialling the use of competency-based assessment. We have also sought to improve the quality of our relationships with recruitment suppliers by reducing the number of organisations we work with.
Although our staff turnover is not significant we have some rising levels of employee absenteeism. We are attempting to address this by carrying out absence management reviews and sharing best practice amongst the businesses.