A Glasgow businessman has expressed his puzzlement at being unable to fill ten job vacancies.
William Roddie, whose family-owned company Spectrum Properties operates over 700 commercial properties across the city, is currently struggling to recruit people for a range of roles including drivers, motor mechanics, labourers, bench hands and accounts assistants.
“We advertise on one of Scotland’s leading jobs websites and receive fewer job applications than we would like, but we have found that a significant number of people fail to show up for their arranged interviews,” he revealed. “It is then even more baffling that all too many people who have been offered roles in our business, every one of which pays above the Living Wage rate, do not appear on the day they are due to start with us.”
Spectrum Properties provides business centre space, industrial workshops and units, warehousing and manufacturing facilities and secure open yard storage along with business support services in and around Glasgow.
The firm has also been involved in the city’s built environment preservation, creating new uses for former municipally-owned properties such as Hillhead High School, Shakespeare Street school, Shettleston Baths and Sir William Burrell’s former home in Great Western Road. Most recently it has started work on restoring the façade of Golfhill School in Dennistoun.
Mr Roddie, who started his working life in Glasgow as an apprentice motor mechanic and has built his property business over the last 30 years, added, “Perhaps the furlough scheme is trapping people in a mindset where they fear going to work but I do not understand why the old desire for well-paid work in this city seems to have dried-up.”
