Every employer in a shortage sector eventually reaches the same conclusion by the same route. They advertise for an experienced person for three months, get four applications, hire the least bad one at a premium, and watch them leave in five months for another premium somewhere else.
- In a genuine shortage, training is not the expensive option. It is the only one that scales.
- With no track record to read, screen for reasoning, reliability and attitude to correction.
- The first ninety days decide retention. An apprentice with no assigned mentor is a leaver in waiting.
- Budget for the leavers. If two in ten go, you are doing normally - and the eight are still cheaper than agency hires.
At that point training your own stops being the idealistic option and becomes the arithmetic one. The question is not whether to hire trainees. It is how to do it without wasting a year finding out you picked wrong.
What do you screen for when there is nothing to read?
An apprentice has no relevant work history by definition, so a CV tells you almost nothing. That is not a problem to be worked around - it is a reason to screen on things that actually predict success.
- Reasoning under uncertainty. Give them a small realistic problem from the job with no perfect answer and score the thinking, not the conclusion.
- Attitude to being corrected. "Tell me about a time somebody showed you that you had done something wrong. What did you do next?" This one question predicts more than any qualification.
- Reliability signals. Anything sustained over time: a part-time job kept for a year, a sports team, caring responsibilities, a hobby with visible progress.
- Genuine interest in the craft. Not enthusiasm for the word career - specific curiosity about the actual work.
What matters much less than employers assume: school grades in unrelated subjects, a polished application, and confidence in a first conversation. Confidence at seventeen mostly measures upbringing.
How should the advert read?
Like an offer of a path, with the hard numbers still present. Young candidates and career changers are not naive - they have heard "great opportunity to learn" before and know it sometimes means unpaid work.
- What they will be able to do after a year, stated concretely.
- What they will earn now, and what they will earn once qualified.
- Who trains them - a name and a role, not "the team".
- The hours, honestly, including whether study time is inside or outside them.
- What happens at the end. A job, if there is one. Say so plainly, because the fear of being dropped after training is real.
The first ninety days decide everything
Most apprentice failures are not selection failures. They are supervision failures dressed up as selection failures.
A trainee with no assigned mentor spends their first weeks trying not to be in the way, learns little, concludes they are not wanted, and leaves. The employer concludes young people do not want to work. Neither is true; the structure was missing.
- One named mentor, with time actually allocated for it. Not "ask anyone".
- A written plan for the first month, even a rough one, so progress is visible to both sides.
- A short check-in every week for the first two months. Ten minutes is enough. The point is that problems surface early.
- Something they can do unsupervised by week three. Competence at one small thing is what makes a trainee feel like staff rather than an observer.
This is ordinary onboarding done deliberately, and the general version applies here too - see onboarding frontline staff.
How do you keep them once they are trained?
The honest answer is that you cannot keep all of them, and a plan that depends on keeping all of them is not a plan.
What you can do is remove the obvious reasons to leave at the moment they become valuable. Move them onto qualified pay the day they qualify rather than at the next review. Give them something to aim at next. And say out loud that you want them to stay, because a surprising number of newly qualified people leave believing nobody noticed them.
Budget for attrition anyway. If two in ten leave within a year of qualifying, that is a normal result, and the eight who stayed cost you far less than eight experienced hires bought at shortage prices.
Where do you find apprentices?
Not on job boards. Sixteen to twenty-two year olds and career changers are on social platforms, and they respond to seeing the actual work rather than reading about it.
A short video of somebody doing the job, with an honest first line about pay and training, will out-recruit a formal apprenticeship advert by a wide margin. The audience arguments are the same as in hiring Gen Z and recruiting on TikTok.
The takeaway
Screen for reasoning, reliability and how someone takes correction. Put the money and the path in the advert. Assign a real mentor and check in weekly. Pay properly the day they qualify. Expect to lose a couple anyway, and count the ones you kept against what experienced hires would have cost.
Qwiza's quizzes are built to score exactly this kind of candidate - people with no relevant history, judged on how they think rather than what they have already done.
Cannot find experienced staff?
Qwiza screens candidates on how they reason, not on a CV they do not have yet - and delivers a ranked shortlist within 48 hours.
See how Qwiza worksFrequently asked questions
How do we assess an apprentice with no work experience?
Score reasoning rather than history. Give a small realistic problem from the job and judge the thinking, ask how they responded the last time somebody corrected them, and look for anything sustained over time - a year in a part-time job, a team, a hobby with visible progress.
What is a realistic retention rate for apprentices?
Losing roughly one or two in ten within a year of qualifying is normal. Plan for it rather than treating it as failure. The ones who stay are usually cheaper and more loyal than experienced hires bought at shortage prices.
Should the advert say what happens after training?
Yes, plainly. The fear of being trained and then dropped is common and it suppresses applications. If there is a job at the end, say so. If it depends, say what it depends on. Vagueness here costs you the candidates who are thinking seriously.
