Last month, Simon Marshall from ActionCoach interviewed our Managing Director, Phil Golding, as part of the organisation’s Business Spotlight series.

Watch the full video to hear why we work with employers to create fairer routes into work, how we’re simplifying apprenticeships and other government-funded training schemes for busy employers and Phil’s own experience of being supported by a company that cares and his obsession with playing forward this support!  

The full interview:

Haven’t got time to watch the full interview? Here are some snippets…

What is Supplytrain and what do you do?

Here at Supplytrain, our mission is to help employers create fairer routes into work. We do a lot of work with businesses, in particular small businesses, to help them figure out where their skills gaps lay and see if recruiting differently would solve some of their recruitment challenges. We try to get employers to recruit people that might how have the usual qualifications, experience or connections they seek, then help them to put a package of support together to help those people develop in-house, saving them time and money in the long-run whilst giving people from different walks of life a chance to prove themselves on the job.

What are the benefits for the young people you place?

We know that talent is everywhere, but opportunities are not. A lot of potential candidates come to us who have the ambition and drive to work, but believe because they did not go to the right university or worked in the right places or had mental health problems in the past that they can’t access the same opportunities as others. Supplytrain recruits for companies that care, then offers mentoring support for those under 25, to help them to get up-to-speed in their job. With support from their careers coach we can help young recruits to manage any issues they may have at home, trouble getting to work or struggling to settle into work, so they go on to thrive.  

What are the benefits for the employers you work with?

As for employer: small businesses who do not have a HR team find it difficult to run a huge recruitment drive so they tend to only search for candidates who have experience, but this leaves their talent pool smaller each year. We encourage these employers to look a little wider and broader and find great candidates through us. 

Supplytrain is also one of 35 companies in the UK who has been approved by the Government as a Flexi-Job Apprenticeship agency. This means we can employ apprentices on behalf of other businesses which massively benefits small businesses, as we hear a lot of them say they would love to take on an apprentice, but they don’t have the staff or time for all the admin. That is where we come in. Supplytrain handles and manages all the paperwork, recruitment and training provider selection on behalf of the business then provides pastoral support to apprentices on their journey. All we need from employers is a job description and person specification and we do the rest.

How did you get into this type of work?

My passion for this job comes from my own lived experience. In my early 20s I had a lot of mental health issues and worked a lot of outdoors-based temp jobs. A lot of my issues were around social anxiety and being in an enclosed office environment, but I knew I was quite good at sales and marketing and talking to people even though I had these issues. Eventually I applied for a job at a college in the marketing department and it was the first job where I told the truth about my anxiety and I was gobsmacked when they gave me the job and said they would support me with these issues and help me develop as part of the team. 

I’m so grateful for that, as those people helped me get over a lot of my mental health problems and start a career I knew I’d be good at. This is the reason I setup Supplytrain – I want to play that support forward. It doesn’t have to be mental health, but we are building a team, so that wherever their are barriers to employment or where there is a gap between education and employers we work with those employers to put a package of support together to bridge that gap and help people fulfil their in-work potental.