Mr Gray said: “We’ve been hiring hard during the course of the last two or three months and we continue to see that carrying on into the beginning of next year as well.

“In an ideal world, you can choose or find someone who’s got experience in the industry and maybe works with a competitor. That is very challenging at the moment.

“We’ve had to obviously look at maybe adjacent sectors… we’ve also had to look at maybe people with less experience.”

Amid a shortage of staff, the balance of power in the jobs market has shifted towards candidates over employers.

Mr Gray said employers are being forced to rein in their demands for candidates and tweak job adverts to fill vacancies.

He explained: “The actual job ads are being tweaked now. Whereby in the past you might have been met with a filtering message, which might be ‘we need people with X experience’… now it’s ‘we’re a great brand to work with, we’re exciting, we’re fun’.”

Worker shortages have been caused by a boom in post-lockdown demand and lower supply. Covid forced some workers into early retirement while the pandemic also caused a slump in net migration.