Britain isn’t working. There are more than a million job vacancies and more than a million people unemployed. Why the two aren’t resolving is complex, with more than a little connection to Brexit and the recent pandemic. But with Big Issue Recruit, we plan to do something about it.
The new initiative sees Big Issue Group partnering with organisations across the UK to find employment opportunities for more people, bridging the gap between recruiters and candidates to get Britain working again.
Here two such partners explain how they are joining Big Issue Recruit to change more lives through enterprise, and why other employers should do the same.
Dan Brown, CEO, Positive Transformation Group
Looking back, Dan Brown can see that there were a couple of people who turned his life around. Homeless at 15, sleeping first in a friend’s car and then outdoors in the village of West Horndon, Essex, things were bad. And they were on the verge of getting much worse. Brown was standing outside a local recruitment company in nearby Brentwood looking at cards in the window and searching for work, when the first of those people came along.
“The lady who owned it came up, and we were just talking,” Brown recalls. “She helped me find some work in warehouses and things like that. She was really, really supportive, even taking me to and from jobs on various occasions. Eventually she helped me get a telesales job. That led to her finding me another job, which was working for a very small technology company in Essex.”
Once he got in the door of the tech company, Brown found his second mentor. “He really went out of his way to give me these opportunities to develop inside that company. Then that company ended up being my gateway. They ended up getting bought by a big American company and that was it. I was off into a whole other world.”
