Crystal Umbrella

As the latest Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) Jobs Outlook results are released, the organisation has praised contractors and freelance workers, stating that they provide “crucial services” to cover seasonal demand.

Chief executive of REC, Kevin Green stated: “Whilst many of us have downed tools, thousand of key workers and recruitment professionals are hard at work. Temporary, contract and locum staff as well as interim managers provide crucial front line services and keep Britain working over Christmas. At the same time, recruitment professionals play a pivotal role in responding quickly and efficiently to the demand for often highly-skilled staff in sectors such as healthcare, transport, care, logistics and technology.”

The December Jobs Outlook showed that 22% of employers believe that business is improving. This is a staggering 21% increase since September.

Roger Tweedy, REC’s director of research said: “”At last there is evidence that life is returning to the UK’s labour market. After several months of uncertainty it seems that firms are becoming more confident about their future hiring intentions. Although if previous recessions are anything to go by we would expect unemployment to continue to rise even after the economy returns to growth, this report shows positive signs that unemployment will not be as high as people at the beginning of the year predicted.”

He concluded: “Whilst the labour market is still very fragile, the feedback from recruiters on the frontline of the labour market suggests that it is becoming easier to place jobseekers into work. As the labour market becomes more fluid once more this in turn will create more vacancies”.

As we begin to slowly move out of the recession, all eyes are on the jobs market for signs of continued improvement. The Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) has just released their latest Jobs Outlook report and it signals that employers’ hiring intentions are once again on the increase.

Data contained within the report shows that ten per cent of the employers that the REC spoke to believed that their permanent staff quota would rise in the next three months. In the report released at the end of the last month only five per cent of employers were predicting an increase in permanent staff. Similarly, looking over the year ahead, sixteen per cent of employers believe that their permanent staff will increase over the twelve months, which is an increase of three per cent from last month.

However, with regards to temporary staff, seventy two per cent of employers believe that the number of staff they use will stay the same over the next year. Only five percent of employers expect an increase in temporary staff over the next quarter.

Rather startling was the disclosure by forty per cent of employers that the recession had not affected their staff at all. Of course, redundancies do continue and twenty two per cent of employers are planning redundancies, although this was a reduction of two per cent from the previous month. However, as the recession continues to loom large, employers are still required to take action to cope in these difficult financial times and as such, three per cent are planning to cut employee working hours and introduce pay reductions.

Director of research at REC, Roger Tweedy says: “It is encouraging that employer confidence is slowly but surely starting to manifest itself in terms of hiring intentions. However, it is very early days and a number of employers are still making redundancies or cutting working hours. Regular data on how employers are reacting to subtle changes in the jobs market is essential and will help recruiters to plan ahead over the coming months.”

A Nottingham-based recruitment agency has devised a new incentive to encourage employers to hire permanent IT staff instead of continuing to hire IT contractors to fill their positions. Ratio Search & Solutions are offering to pay the candidate’s first month’s wage if they are taken on as a permanent employee. This incentive aims to increase the demand for full-time, permanent IT staff and is applicable to any of the permanent ICT job-seekers and end clients on the agency’s books.

Ratio Search & Solutions have revealed that the development of this incentive has been as a direct result of the continued use of temps to fill IT positions. They have admitted that their incentive is a ‘radical’ step, however, with the current economic climate still affecting recruitment, they said that many employers are still reluctant to hire permanent, full-time employees.

Their incentive to employers is not just financial. While Ratio will pay the first month’s salary of any successful candidate, they are also offering a guarantee to the employer that is that employee leaves the company within the first twelve months, a replacement will be provided.

Recruitment director of Ratio Search & Solutions, Steve Byrne, spoke to MicroScope about this recent development at the agency. He said that they hoped the incentive would “knock down some of the barriers” to permanent employment.

He continued: “We have never seen such demand for temporary staff”. He attributed this to the fact that contract staff do not increase overheads for employers.

The results of the latest Powerchex Annual Pre-Employment Screening Survey are in and they show that almost one in five job-seekers are lying to their prospective employers. The research is based on questions posed to 4, 735 job-seekers within the financial sector. According to Powerchex 19% of those seeking work lie on their CV and young people under 21 are now 30% more likely to lie on their CV than they were this time last year. Moreover, the research showed that IT contractors with less than factual CVs had increased three-fold to 18% over the past year.

Most young people surveyed stated that they were likely to change their academic qualifications, for example changing a 2:2 degree to a 2:1. Other job-seekers surveyed said that they would be economical with the truth regarding previous job titles and duties to exaggerate the responsibilities they had held. Others lied about their reason for leaving their previous employment.

Managing director of Powerchex, Alexandra Kelly commented: “This is the second year in a row there has been an increase in the number of candidates lying to recruiters. The pressure of the recession job market seems to have led more applicants to believe they should lie or make embellished claims to get jobs.”
Emma Entwhistle from IT staffing firm Crimson Skills, in an interview with Recruiter, said that recruiters needed to take the time to understand the industry, in order to identify those candidates who are being less than truthful.

She continued, “I have been in IT recruitment for 15 years. The way that most recruitment works is on buzzwords. It takes a long time if you are non-technical to keep up to date with technology. You have got to put the time in as a recruiter to keep your knowledge up to date and I think that is where a lot of recruiters are falling down. Get a proper appreciation of what contractors do rather than recruiting off buzzwords. Properly understand the role and don’t just recruit off the job spec.”

The most recent CIPD/KPMG Labour Market Outlook (LMO) has shown that demand for staff within the private sector has begun to stabilise. Both the scale of redundancies and the number of planned redundancies have reduced over the past quarter. By contrast, employer pessimism continues in the public sector. Pay increase expectations have also fallen below the rate of inflation.

Andrew Smith, KPMG Chief Economist commented, “Despite the recent flurry of more upbeat economic news, many firms still lack confidence in the recovery and continue to expect tough times ahead. Most striking is the large number of firms planning to defer or cancel pay reviews. This conservative approach indicates that business remains unconvinced that current economic green shoots will lead to sustainable healthy growth in the near term. Expectations that pay increases will fall below the rate of inflation, resulting in a reduction in real earnings, will be a further concern and could stifle any consumer led recovery.”

Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) director of external relations, Tom Hadley, spoke of the job market for temporary workers: “The employment landscape remains volatile at best but life is slowly returning to the temporary work market. The rate of contraction for temporary and contract work has eased to the slowest in 10 months and flexible working options will continue to provide a crucial outlet for both job-seekers and employers over the coming months. With the government currently considering how best to implement new EU regulations on agency work, it will be vital to ensure that the new legislation does not negate this positive contribution and clog up this key route into work for thousands of workers.

Recruitment firm, Hays has carried out its second survey since the start of the current economic downturn. Their findings show that recruiters consider leadership skills as one of the most important attributes when hiring for their IT departments. This research is likely to encourage jobless contractors to talk up their experience of management processes and team leadership when applying for positions.

Hays commented that managerial techies are still one of the hardest groups to recruit within the IT sector. This has remained the case despite a wider pool of candidates who are less likely to negotiate about low pay rates.

Managing directors of Hays IT, James Lloyd Townshend said that pay has been “driven down because candidates are more readily available and generally have less negotiating power.”

The survey also showed that one of the main issues for employers is the ‘cultural fit’ of the candidate into their organisation. Many employers are now spending more time and money on developing the communication skills and leadership qualities of their IT management staff. This has led to 80% of the firms surveyed responding that they had confidence in their IT managers to do the job required of them. Hays reported that the 122 IT bosses that they surveyed said they were looking for business intelligence consultants and enterprise architects.

However, the latest REC Report on Jobs reported no shortage of any particular contract IT skill. This report said, “Although temporary/contract staff billings decreased for an eleventh successive month in June, the latest fall was the least marked since last September. The slower reduction in short-term appointments reflected a weaker drop in demand for temp staff.”