It seems many employers in the area are having to look as far afield as Poland to find unskilled workers to do manual work, and an overwhelming majority of people who live in Bordon and Whitehill do not actually work in the area.
Andrew Luff said at the meeting: "Five employers round here are all going Polish. This is something that needs to be addressed in Bordon."
Mr Luff runs his own company JR Luff and Co, which is based in Headley, and grows pot plants and bedding for garden centres across the south of England.
He said he employed three Polish workers this year for a period of two or three months in the summer. His company employs 14 people in total and extra in the spring.
At the meeting, he cited Blackmoor Apple Shop and Selborne Brickworks as other employers which have been forced to look for help from further afield.
"There is a lack of availability of local staff," he said.
"We get fed up with trying year-after-year to advertise and find people locally.
"Everybody thinks that we all need these specially trained people but a lot of businesses just need pairs of hands."
He said new training schemes for young people in Bordon and Whitehill were not necessarily the answer.
"It's not always trained people that we need, it is the not necessarily skilled, but very useful people that are lacking.
"They are not the sort of people that need to be trained in a college, but just people to do physical jobs.
"There's a lack of bottom end grass-roots employees, particularly because of the high cost of housing. The base employees are the heart and soul of most companies, because without them everyone is out of work."
Headley parish councillor, Carol Burns runs Argolin Ltd, a Liphook-based company which manufactures packaging for electronic components. She has in the past had foreign employees, but had problems with the language barrier. Now, she often employs workers from outside the local area.
She said: "It is very hard to find people who want to be trained to be good operators and be part of a small company.
"It's a pity there are not more young people who can come in as we give them good training."