Latest news
2009-12-22 15:03:26
Recruitment Market Showing Signs of Recovery
Employers are becoming more confident in their hiring decisions, with an increase in permanent recruitment and growth in temporary placements for the first time in over a year.
Latest figures published by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) and KPMG showed the first rise in permanent appointments for 17 months and the first increase in temporary billings since July 2008.
The Report on Jobs, published today, showed that the index reading for the number of people placed in permanent positions was 50.6, compared to 46.1 for July – a reading above 50 signals change on the index scale.
Agency billings from the temporary/contract sector also rose from 45.1 in July to 50.3 in August.
Meanwhile, the rate of decline in demand for permanent staff eased to the weakest for 13 months in August with the Permanent Staff Vacancy Index climbing from 42.5 to 44.6.
Falls in wages and salaries continued but the reductions in both permanent and temporary/contract staff hourly wages were the slowest in 10 months.
Bernard Brown, partner and head of business services at KPMG, described the news as positive, but added it was too early to speculate whether it signalled the end of the recession.
"One important factor to watch over the coming months will be how the public sector is coping with the financial and economic crisis," he said. "Given that employment costs are a substantial element of public sector spending, you would expect significant pressure on those costs going forward. This is likely to have a significant impact on the UK jobs market."
Kevin Green, chief executive of the REC, warned that the stabilisation of the jobs environment must not be put at risk by "ill-designed regulation", citing the Agency Workers Directive.
"This legislation needs careful consideration to avoid putting jobs at risk and must not be introduced until the last possible moment in 2011," he said.
Elsewhere, a separate survey of 2,100 UK employers revealed that hiring confidence is starting to return among firms.
The UK's net employment outlook rose from -6% to -2% during the fourth quarter of 2009 and 9% of employers intend to actively increase headcount over the next three months, the Manpower UK survey found.
Mark Cahill, managing director at Manpower UK, said: "There are a number of early positive hiring indicators emerging from employers in sectors including finance and business services, public and social and construction, which suggest we may have reached a turning point."
i4Jobs has experienced this first hand, having had a record breaking last quarter for 2009!
2009-12-22 15:02:41
Online HR Job Ads Increase for Second Month
The number of HR jobs available online has increased for the second month in a row, in contrast to demand dipping across all sectors, the latest figures have revealed.
The August 2009 Monster Employment Index saw a one-point rise in HR hiring, from 63 to 64 points, where the baseline is 100. The figure is still far from the reading of 162 recorded a year ago, but follows an 11% rise in HR job demand recorded last month, when the index rose from 57 to 63.
Overall online job demand fell by one point, from 110 to 109, with the education, engineering and telecommunications sectors showing the worst decline.
The index - compiled from an analysis of millions of online job opportunities culled from corporate career sites and job boards - recorded that the marketing, PR and media sector was the best performer, rising from 99 to 105 points.
Hugo Sellert, head of economic research at Monster Worldwide, said: "Although employer demand has remained largely stable since the beginning of the year, businesses have not yet resumed hiring. The level of vacancies across the UK is still insufficient to reverse increasing job losses."
The latest unemployment figures show that the number of people out of work has now reached 2.43m.
"The rising number of unemployed means that businesses have a larger pool of available talent to choose from. This increase in ease-of-hiring is in turn contributing to the reduction in advertising of live jobs."
Overall, the August 2009 index was down 37% year-on-year.
2009-12-22 12:09:43
Monster Index predicts upturn in HR hiring
The HR job market has hit rock bottom and hiring should resume by the end of the summer, a review of online recruitment asserts.
The Monster Employment Index found that HR recruitment had stabilised, with June seeing a one point increase to 57 (where the baseline is 100) in the number of job vacancies advertised online.
The number of jobs advertised across all sectors in the same month increased by 1%, but was still down 38% on June 2008.
Hugo Sellert, head of economic research at Monster Worldwide, told Personnel Today: "Recruitment in the sector has stabilised but it has not started to recover yet. It has reached the point where many companies that needed to institute a hiring freeze have done so, so it has bottomed out now.
"I expect companies to start hiring HR people again at the end of the summer, but there's still a lot of uncertainty. We will start to see more favourable conditions for HR, but it will be slow progress."
Meanwhile, online advertising for jobs in London increased by 3%, which Sellert said indicated the start of a turning point.
He said: "The two-month increase in advertising in London is a positive thing and shows a bit of a turning point."
The report also found demand for healthcare and social workers had increased by 71% in the year to June, while demand for teachers had increased by 44% - but Sellert insisted this was not the indication of market recovery it might appear to be.
He said the increase was due to continued shortages in these areas and the increased use of online advertising in the public sector to cut costs.
"The upturn in these sectors underscores the reported shortages of teachers and healthcare workers," he said. "These shortages for certain specialised skills, combined with the increased utilisation of online recruiting, has led to the increase in online vacancies."
He added that when positions are hard to fill the adverts stay online longer and are re-posted on multiple websites, distorting the results.
The report also showed that construction vacancies had fallen by 5%, but Sellert said the reduction was exaggerated because the abundance of construction workers looking for jobs meant companies often did not need to use online recruitment.
2009-09-17 20:19:50
Online recuitment top employers list filling jobs.
Fifteen years after online recruitment first hit our computer screens, corporate websites have become the recruitment method of choice, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development's (CIPD) 2009 recruitment survey.
Its poll of 755 employers found that 78% used their corporate websites for recruitment, compared with 29% using commercial jobs boards. And a survey of 106 organisations by Personnel Today's paid-for sister service XpertHR - covering almost 289,500 employees - showed that almost nine in 10 (87.7%) respondents now use some form of online recruitment, with three-quarters routinely posting all their vacancies on their corporate websites.
XpertHR found that just over half (52%) of respondents used their intranets to advertise job vacancies, while one in 10 (10%) conducted online recruitment through membership of a recruitment consortium. Unlike jobs boards, consortiums tend to be not-for-profit ventures, co-operatively managed, and their services tend to be restricted to employers of a similar kind.
The current economic downturn has dramatically reduced employers' demand for new recruits, and those that have continued hiring have been under financial pressure to cut recruitment costs. But eight in 10 respondents (79%) said using their own corporate websites 'provides candidates of the same quality for lower cost than [other] recruitment methods'. And almost nine in 10 (88%) believed it provided better-informed candidates 'who will know something about us and our work'.
Few other reasons seem to have as much bearing on employers' decisions to use their own websites to fill vacancies. For example, only one in four (25%) does so for reasons relating to equal opportunities, and only 8% because they believe it provides better-quality candidates. But other advantages cited included:
- the ability to add more information than might be possible in a newspaper advert
- its usefulness in determining an applicant's computer literacy
- its ability to reduce 'response-handling work in HR'.
However, despite more than a decade's-worth of progress, many employers were still dissatisfied with their online recruitment offering. The top three gripes cited by employers were:
- poor appearance of the website (50%)
- poor navigation (46%)
- lack of 'bells and whistles' (such as interactive elements, videos and pictures) to make the site more appealing (42%).
2009-09-17 20:18:50
Online recruitment is key to grabbing great graduates
Set against the most severe recession of most people's lifetimes, the 20th annual IRS graduate recruitment survey shows that online recruitment has become more important than ever as a tool to help employers reach top talent.
Online methods, such as an employer's own website or external jobsites, remain the most common and effective ways of attracting good-quality graduate candidates, the IRS survey found. The current hiring round is a tough one for graduates, with demand waning slightly on the part of recruiters, combined with salary freezes for graduate hires. But the turbulent economic conditions do not make it an easy graduate recruiting ground for employers either – and do not necessarily make it any more straightforward to find top-quality talent.
Over the past few years, the pattern of employer demand for graduates has been on an upwards trajectory, mirroring the steady increase in the number of people graduating from university actively looking for work – around 185,000 each year. But while supply remains buoyant, employers' demand for graduates in the current economic downturn appears to be waning. According to the latest Association of Graduate Recruiters' survey, one-quarter of graduate vacancies have disappeared, and there are now an average of 48 applications for every vacancy.
Thom Staight, director at recruiter Michael Page HR, says online methods are the only way to handle graduate recruitment efficiently. "You're dealing with such vast numbers of applicants, and it's become more acute this year. If you have a good consumer brand, the number of applications you can get is frankly terrifying. With the best will in the world, the only way of effectively handling that number of applicants is by doing it online – you can't do it with pieces of paper floating around everywhere.
Attract
"The attraction for the recruiter is not just that you can attract more candidates that way – you're generally using a CV management tool as well. Some of our clients' graduate recruitment teams used to be half-a-dozen-plus people. Those numbers have been reduced dramatically. It takes less human resource to do these things if you're set up to do it properly online."
According to the IRS survey, 72.3% of employers have tried to recruit graduates in the past, 63.8% are currently trying to recruit graduates, and 86.2% predict that they will in the future. This suggests that current demand has tailed off slightly but that, encouragingly, employers are optimistic of their demand for graduates increasing.
Anthony Pierce, HR practice leader at recruiter Hudson, says: "Certainly the actual numbers of graduate hires have declined, but larger cuts have been more where employers can save money – they are still investing in talent for the future. And we are still heavily recruiting for graduate recruiters."
Staight adds: "People are certainly hiring fewer graduates, but there are also fewer companies recruiting who have completely cut their graduate schemes compared to last recession. The quality of some of the graduates is very high this year, much higher than in some previous years.
"At Michael Page, for example, we've hired far fewer graduates this year, but I have to say the quality of people we have seen has been really good. I think that's because the organisations who would normally hoover up large numbers of quality graduates in other times are taking so few people this year."
Demand
In terms of current demand, six in 10 (60%) employers that recruit graduates are taking on roughly the same number as before. A further quarter (25%) are recruiting fewer than before, while the remainder (15%) have increased their graduate intake.
The overwhelming reason for reducing the level of graduate recruitment is the economic situation. Others referred to a change of organisational strategy, while two employers said the reduction followed a decision to close their organisations' graduate entry programmes.
There is a plethora of different attraction tools at the disposal of graduate recruiters, particularly with the ever-increasing sophistication and innovation offered by new technology. Using the internet, either the employer's own corporate site or an external jobs board, has become indispensable to most employers. An overwhelming 79% of employers surveyed use an internet site run by the organisation, such as their own corporate site. And an external internet site that carries more than one organisation's graduate vacancies, such as a job board, is used by 58% of organisations surveyed.
Gareth Jones, leader at recruiter Courtenay HR, says that while online recruitment is definitely here to stay, employers must bear in mind that it is constantly developing. "While it's not just graduates that are using it, the important role they play is in the 'next generation' of online recruitment. There are a number of sites out there that graduates are playing with that are not on the radar of mainstream recruiters or HR. They're not job sites, or social media sites as we understand them, but combinations of both.
"The way young people look for jobs and generally interact has a significant impact on the way recruitment develops. As a generation we rely heavily on e-mail, but I doubt that will be the same for graduates. Many no longer communicate via e-mail, indeed some universities no longer issue e-mail addresses as the graduates communicate via social media instead."
Respondents were also asked to indicate which three attraction methods they rated as the most effective. With one exception, the top five most used methods are also the five considered the most effective by employers. For example, an internet site run by the organisation is the most popular method and also perceived as the most successful, by 37% of respondents. The exception is notifying vacancies to university careers services, an approach adopted by 70% of employers but ranked only seventh in the league of most-effective methods.
Remote
It is evident that a remote, online approach is perceived as the best way of appealing to potential graduate applicants, combined with the more personal, face-to-face method of participating in recruitment fairs.
The survey also showed that application methods are firmly online. Setting aside special provision for prospective candidates with disabilities, the most common way in which applications are accepted for graduate vacancies is in an online format. In line with the increasing sophistication evident in the use of e-recruitment, more than three-quarters (77%) of employers provide an electronic application process for prospective graduate applicants.
Other application methods currently in use include CVs (47% of employers); paper-based application forms (31%), and letters of application (25%). Some employers maintain both online and more traditional, paper-based application processes. For example, more than two-thirds of public sector employers (67%) allow paper-based applications, but a high proportion (78%) also operate online systems.
Paul Duffield, a partner at recruiter Frazer Jones, warns that online recruitment requires as careful planning and execution as traditional methods. "Online recruitment is here to stay," he says. "But employers need to make sure they have the resource to provide the service at the back end of it. If there is an employer brand loud and proud on a website, and someone applies for a job and gets no response or acknowledgement, it can harm that brand.
"The recession has meant a load more applicants, and while there are plenty of decent ones in there, equally those that aren't deemed decent need to be dealt with decently. Recruiters and clients alike are both guilty of not sometimes dealing with candidates in the right way. There is an art to online recruitment as much as there is to the traditional methods."
IRS graduate recruitment survey: key points
- IRS's 20th annual graduate recruitment survey was conducted in September 2009, and involved 130 employers collectively employing more than 1.6 million people.
- Starting salaries were frozen between 2008 and 2009, according to the median (midpoint in the range).
- The median starting in 2009-10 is £24,000. Starting salaries are not keeping pace with increases in pay and earnings as a whole.
- Current demand for graduates has tailed off slightly but employers are optimistic of their demand increasing in the future.
- Online methods, such as an employer's own website, remain the most common and effective ways of attracting good-quality candidates.
- Assessment centres are widely seen as the best approach for selecting new graduate recruits, followed by interviews.
- More than one-third of respondents indicated that they had encountered problems with graduate recruitment over the past two to three years, with the main issue being poor-quality candidates.
2009-09-17 20:03:54
Recruitment Market Showing Signs of Recovery
Employers are becoming more confident in their hiring decisions, with an increase in permanent recruitment and growth in temporary placements for the first time in over a year.
Latest figures published by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) and KPMG showed the first rise in permanent appointments for 17 months and the first increase in temporary billings since July 2008.
The Report on Jobs, published today, showed that the index reading for the number of people placed in permanent positions was 50.6, compared to 46.1 for July – a reading above 50 signals change on the index scale.
Agency billings from the temporary/contract sector also rose from 45.1 in July to 50.3 in August.
Meanwhile, the rate of decline in demand for permanent staff eased to the weakest for 13 months in August with the Permanent Staff Vacancy Index climbing from 42.5 to 44.6.
Falls in wages and salaries continued but the reductions in both permanent and temporary/contract staff hourly wages were the slowest in 10 months.
Bernard Brown, partner and head of business services at KPMG, described the news as positive, but added it was too early to speculate whether it signalled the end of the recession.
"One important factor to watch over the coming months will be how the public sector is coping with the financial and economic crisis," he said. "Given that employment costs are a substantial element of public sector spending, you would expect significant pressure on those costs going forward. This is likely to have a significant impact on the UK jobs market."
Kevin Green, chief executive of the REC, warned that the stabilisation of the jobs environment must not be put at risk by "ill-designed regulation", citing the Agency Workers Directive.
"This legislation needs careful consideration to avoid putting jobs at risk and must not be introduced until the last possible moment in 2011," he said.
Elsewhere, a separate survey of 2,100 UK employers revealed that hiring confidence is starting to return among firms.
The UK's net employment outlook rose from -6% to -2% during the fourth quarter of 2009 and 9% of employers intend to actively increase headcount over the next three months, the Manpower UK survey found.
Mark Cahill, managing director at Manpower UK, said: "There are a number of early positive hiring indicators emerging from employers in sectors including finance and business services, public and social and construction, which suggest we may have reached a turning point."
i4Jobs has experienced this first hand, having had a record breaking quarter for 2009!
2009-05-04 12:34:00
Recruitment difficulties in a competitive job market
Over the past decade we have seen labour shortages and recruitment difficulties lead to a more competitive job market, meaning that employers are turning to agencies and headhunters to find the talent they need.
This is making recruitment expensive for many organisations - in conflict with the potential constraints placed on organisations by the global credit crunch.
Recent research conducted at Cranfield (in conjunction with Monster) suggested that e-recruitment may provide a solution to these issues. Online recruitment may have grown rapidly over the past 10 years, but many organisations are still not taking advantage of the full functionality of this technology to attract, sift, manage and respond to applicants.
Significant cost savings can be achieved through the reduction in agency and advertising fees, less need for paper and postage and a drop in headcount due to administrative savings. E-recruitment can also lead to considerable efficiency savings through the move to a more streamlined process. Vacancies can be posted online immediately and reviewed as they arrive, making the process much faster. This means that the overall time to hire is greatly reduced, so there is less chance of a good candidate being recruited by a competitor before the process is complete.
Not only is the process faster, cheaper and more efficient, but it is also transparent, and the data produced by the system is accurate and readily available. E-recruitment can also be used to ensure that recruitment processes are consistent across an organisation so that everyone is treated the same way regardless of where they have been sourced from.
The benefits of e-recruitment may seem too good to be true. Many employers worry about its capacity to reach the candidates that they need or to a diverse population of candidates. But research shows that people from all industry sectors and at all levels search for jobs online.
In the current recruitment climate, employers should consider the introduction of an e-recruitment system as a worthwhile investment. This is particularly true for public sector employers which, despite the increasing financial demands placed on them, have so far lagged behind in their use of technology.
2009-02-24 12:33:28
Online recruitment set to increase
Four in 10 employers plan to increase their use of online recruitment over the next 12 months, exclusive research has revealed.
More than 40% of the 1,078 organisations surveyed by Cranfield School of Management, in association with Personnel Today, said they expected to advertise more jobs on external websites in the next 12 months.
And more than one-third (35%) anticipated that online recruitment would outstrip other recruitment methods over the next year, the latest Recruitment Confidence Index (RCI) showed.
Accessing a larger pool of candidates and cost efficiencies were the primary drivers for the surge, with 77% rating access to a larger pool of candidates as very important.
Shaun Tyson, director of the HR research centre at Cranfield School of Management, said the results indicated a major change in recruitment strategy. "The use of online recruitment has reached tipping point and many organisations use external websites as a marketing tool," he said.
The growth reflects the preferred method of looking for a job, with many jobseekers choosing to search online, Tyson said.
Staying ahead of competitors, speed and convenience were also considered to be factors behind the increase. But less than one-tenth of respondents expected to reduce their use of agencies and newspapers for recruitment advertising.
2009-02-22 12:32:55
Online recruitment is the best way round the credit crunch for employers
Over the past decade we have seen labour shortages and recruitment difficulties lead to a more competitive job market, meaning that employers are turning to agencies and headhunters to find the talent they need.
This is making recruitment expensive for many organisations - in conflict with the potential constraints placed on organisations by the global credit crunch.
For the public sector, this picture is particularly problematic, as these organisations face increasing demands from government to cut costs, increase efficiency and be transparent in their spending yet they typically conduct 80% of their recruitment via agencies.
Recent research I conducted at Cranfield (in conjunction with Monster.co.uk) suggested that e-recruitment may provide a solution to these issues. Online recruitment may have grown rapidly over the past 10 years, but my experience shows many organisations are still not taking advantage of the full functionality of this technology to attract, sift, manage and respond to applicants.
Only about 5% of public sector recruitment spend is currently online, suggesting that this sector may be missing a trick. Interviews with 24 employers across the public, private and not for profit sectors found that effective use of e-recruitment could provide a wide range of benefits to employers.
Significant cost savings can be achieved through the reduction in agency and advertising fees, less need for paper and postage and a drop in headcount due to administrative savings. E-recruitment can also lead to considerable efficiency savings through the move to a more streamlined process. Vacancies can be posted online immediately and reviewed as they arrive, making the process much faster. This means that the overall time to hire is greatly reduced, so there is less chance of a good candidate being recruited by a competitor before the process is complete.
Not only is the process faster, cheaper and more efficient, but it is also transparent, and the data produced by the system is accurate and readily available. E-recruitment can also be used to ensure that recruitment processes are consistent across an organisation so that everyone is treated the same way regardless of where they have been sourced from.
The benefits of e-recruitment may seem too good to be true. Many employers worry about its capacity to reach the candidates that they need or to a diverse population of candidates. But research shows that people from all industry sectors and at all levels search for jobs online.
Employers will have difficulty attracting high quality jobseekers if they do not take steps to engage with people. Unless they have a prominent brand, employers must drive jobseekers to their corporate websites through the use of jobs boards or search engines. Once they have done this, they must present themselves in a way that will attract the jobseeker, and build a relationship with them so that they want to apply for a role.
This can be done by creating a content-rich website that is interactive and interesting by using functionality such as videos and podcasts to provide information about the company, and by making the site quick and easy to use, so that jobseekers can find the information they want within three or four clicks. Finally, the application process should be as simple and quick as possible.
In the current recruitment climate, employers should consider the introduction of an e-recruitment system as a worthwhile investment. This is particularly true for public sector employers which, despite the increasing financial demands placed on them, have so far lagged behind in their use of technology. But employers must make sure they pay enough attention to the design of their system if the full benefits are to be realised.
By Emma Parry, research fellow, Cranfield School of Management
2009-02-10 12:31:36
Employers miss out on talent by not embracing e-recruitment
Eight out of 10 organisations are struggling to recruit staff with the right skills but the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) says they are looking in the wrong places by not using e-recruitment.
According to a CMI survey involving the Institute for Employment Studies and Department for Work and Pensions, 67% of managers regularly browse job adverts with 56% admitting they are actively seeking a more senior position. However although 72% are using internet searches only 37% found their current role using the internet.
Jo Causon, director of marketing and corporate affairs at the CMI, said: "There is clearly a need to adjust recruit behaviour because, without casting the recruitment net wider, organisations run the risk of losing out on senior staff who have embraced technology to boost their career prospects."
Responding to the findings the CMI, in association with recruitment firm All the Top Bananas, plans to launch a free online job service that will search websites, newspaper sites and online job boards to provide an index of over 200,000 jobs - representing one in three jobs advertised in the UK.
