January « 2010 « Go To Recruitment Employment Blog

29/01/2010

Agency Workers Directive Update

The final regulations of the new Agency Workers Directive were finally set out last week in Parliament.

The new European directive sets out to offer temporary workers in the UK the same rights as permanent staff, if that worker has worked in the same role for longer than 12 weeks. This will primarily affect contractors that work as sole traders and or as limited companies.

Recruitment Agencies are of course at the forefront of understanding this as many employers taking on contractors from agencies will want to know what implications this new directive will have.

The Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) in there most recent report, showed that 85% of UK businesses have heard of Agency Workers Directive. This is a huge increase of 50% 18 months ago.

It will be interesting to see how Employers take to this new directive as many would have taken on temporary staff knowing that they do not have the same rights as the permanent staff. The AWD now eliminates this freedom for Employer and could have an adverse affect on the temp market. It is something that we will need to keep a close eye on and see how the market reacts.

Filed under: recruitment agencies — admin @ 15:08

26/01/2010

Employers satisfied with Recruitment Agencies

The Recruitment and Employment Confederation has issued a statement of findings from its JobsOutlook.

This report, surveys a number of employers to evaluate the needs and satisfaction of recruitment agencies. The positive statistic that came out of this report was that 91% of the employers surveyed stated they were happy with the service they had received from their recruitment agency.

REC’s director of research, Roger Tweedy added that this is very encouraging as we have just gone through a very difficult period in the job market and this shows recruitment agencies have been maintaining their high standards to please their clients.

Other findings from this report were that 10% of the employers are planning to increase their permanent workforce.
61% of the employers stated that they will continue to use recruitment agencies in the same capacity.
70% of agencies said that their temporary staffing situation will stay the same; this is a slight drop from the last report which stated 77% of the employers believed it would stay the same.

Jobslook is a report based on 200 employers and presented on the results of the last 3 months i.e. 600 responses. This report is published in conjunction with KPMG.

Filed under: recruitment agencies,recruitment agency — admin @ 12:12

21/01/2010

Recruitment agencies look at positive job market in Ireland

Recruitment agencies Premier Group and Sigmar Recruitment have both posted a significant increase in vacancies in the last quarter of 2009.

Premier Group showed a 23 percent increase and Sigmar Recruitment showed a 29% percent increase when they are being compared to the number of jobs they received in the 3rd quarter of 2009.

The increase in jobs has mainly derived from accountancy and IT and both companies have stated that they believe they are now seeing in Ireland a recovery to the job market. A statement from Sigmar Recruitment added that the increase in vacancies could have resulted from companies being over cautious about the recession and had reduced too much staff and so the 4th quarter could be an adjustment to the true level the recession hit Ireland.
Premier Group stated that this is their first increase in jobs since February 2008.

Overall the increase is welcomed by recruitment agencies and hope that accountancy recruitment agencies and IT recruitment agencies start to recover more so in 2010.

Filed under: accountancy recruitment agencies,banking recruitment agencies,IT recruitment agencies — admin @ 10:52

19/01/2010

iPhone needs Recruitment Agencies

iphone and it hugely successful `app store` where developers are constantly creating new applications for the iphone user is desperate need for more developers.

MajorPlayer recruitment agency stated that although the number of iphone developers it has on its books has increased by 350% over the past year, there is still not enough developers to satisfy demand. This coupled with the fact that there are already 125,000 registered iphone developers, means that this is a booming area.

Recruitment agencies are keeping a close eye on this market as it seems this can only continue to rise. The mobile phone application market has already expanded into Nokia Ovi and Google Android market. The phone user always has an appetite for more applications and so developers will always be sought after.

Filed under: recruitment agencies — admin @ 09:39

14/01/2010

NHS spending in question over agency staff

The NHS has been criticized recently by conservative `Shadow Health Secretary` Andrew Lansley. His comments were directed at the Labour government and explained how they were being too wasteful in the way they were running the NHS.

Healthcare recruitment agencies were at the top of his agenda with strong criticism on the £300 million of tax payer’s money being spent on agency staff. Mr Lansley pointed to examples of £375an hour for a Doctor and £146 an hour for a Nurse. His comments were about how the spending must be reduced and an overall more efficient NHS plan.

I think an important note here is that due to the VAT concessions being removed for agency staff, where agencies in the past could charge VAT on their profit element only now they have to charge VAT on the whole charge. This will of course be a huge expense to the NHS and so will distort figures massively in terms of how much the NHS is spending on temps.

At present the health service has agreed funding till 2011; however Ministers are already telling the NHS that there will be tougher times ahead. Last year £1.3 billion was spent on the NHS, the same amount spent 5 years ago when the NHS was being scrutinised over it’s spending, which resorted to a number of permanent posts being frozen and led to more agency staff being used to keep services running.

Sian Thomas, director of NHS Employers mentioned that there is a glum financial outlook and that many trusts will slow down on there permanent recruitment. A department of Health Spokeswoman said that temporary staff has an important role within the NHS as they can respond to fluctuations in demand. I think the Swine Flu epidemic is a good example of this.

Filed under: healthcare recruitment agencies; agency staff — admin @ 18:34

12/01/2010

Graduates resourceful when looking for jobs

The Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) recently reported that UK graduates are the most resourceful at finding work, graduate associations from USA, Canada, South Africa, Hong Kong, Australia and UK, were tested in a number of areas, such as salaries, offer acceptance, retention and training.

Graduates will use resources such as recruitment agencies to find them work, rather than the traditional `Milk Round` method as they realise that recruitment agencies are best placed for finding them the positions they want.

Larger companies are also getting in on the act, with Tesco’s announcing that they will be increasing the number of graduate positions available this year.

These are all quite positive things to hear for graduates, who have probably been struck quite hard by the recession in not obtaining jobs. Hopefully signifying that 2010 will a better year for the graduate job market.

Filed under: graduate job market,recruitment agencies — admin @ 13:40

06/01/2010

Recruitment agencies to send out anonymous CV’s

Researchers for the department of Work and Pensions have discovered there is still much discrimination when employers are looking at CV’s. This has prompted race advisors and equality campaigners to put pressure on the government for recruitment agencies to make CV’s anonymous.

In the research 3000 CV’s were sent out for 987 vacancies, with 3 different CV’s, all CV’s had similar experience but the names used were Nazia Mahmood, Mariam Namagembe and Alison Taylor. The results showed that applicants that appeared to be white had to apply on average 9 times before being interviewed, whilst foreign sounding names would need to apply on average 16 times before getting an interview.

Recruitment and Employment Confederation representative Tom Hadley, said that he has seen a growing trend for recruitment agencies to tend toward anonymous CV’s, especially with agencies in the public sector and those that deal with blue chip companies.

A spokeswoman for the government equalities office said that a taskforce will be meeting in January to discuss this further.

Filed under: recruitment agencies — admin @ 12:15