February « 2011 « Go To Recruitment Employment Blog

28/02/2011

Economy shrinking faster than expected

Recruitment agencies would have kept a close eye on the report issued by the Office for National Statistics today. The main news was that the contraction in the economy in the last quarter of 2010 was not 5% as previously thought but 6%.

The report also broke down further areas, showing that business investment was down 3.2%, other services was down 3.9% and distribution services was down by 6.8%. On the upside though manufacturing recruitment agencies would be buoyant with an increase of 18.3% in manufacturing and food, drink and tobacco was up by 10%.

Putting this all into perspective is that we have a fragile economy, one that could dip again or begin to grow. The one factor that we must all bear in mind when looking at these figures is the timing, the last quarter of 2010 was one of the worst weather conditions the country had for a long time, with many companies unable to operate at full capacity and probably changed many delivery dates to January, therefore would not be surprised if 1^st quarter of 2011 is in fact better than expected. I suppose we will just have to wait and see.

Filed under: Manufacturing empoyment agencies,recruitment agencies — Goto @ 10:14

21/02/2011

False NHS promises

Healthcare recruitment agencies have had much to digest over the past few days, with most of the news over the weekend about the crumbling state of the NHS.

So far there have been reports of job cuts, people left untreated and many A&E and Maternity Units being closed. Not a pretty picture. The promises of the coalition government were that frontline services will not be affected and the main areas of savings will come from a reduction of administration. However the stark reality of the situation is mainly trusts are cutting frontline staff daily.

The royal college of Nursing has warned that 27,000 nurses potentially could lose their jobs. The news also came from South West London hospitals that there could be as many as 1,000 job loses and this could include doctors, nurses and technical staff. This is a slight embarrassment from the coalition point of view as some of these hospitals such as Kingston hospitals were used in the election by Nic Clegg as stating “Every vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote to keep our NHS Safe”.

Unison general secretary Dave Prentis said that this is putting lives at stake and this is reminiscent of the devastating reforms Margaret Thatcher put into place.

My view on this sensitive matter is that there is obviously a reason why these cuts are happening and that the people have only a small understanding of the state of the economy. I suggest that the average person does not know if we are tackling this national debt and if so how effective we are being, I think there has to be much more transparency of what is going on and stories that such as this one only demonstrate that false promises have been broken.

Filed under: healthcare recruitment agencies — Goto @ 10:36

14/02/2011

Give me Jobs!!

Recruitment agencies seem to be busier than ever, as a new report provided by Markit and auditors KPMG showed that the jobs market had its biggest increase for 6 months.

The figures showed that 75,000 new jobs had been created in January and approaching the 100,000 mark, which is a huge contrast to last year when jobs were on the decline.

This is hopefully good news for the government which is currently going through the motion of losing 400,000 workers in the public sector and is dependent on the private sector to take on these people.

The CBI also gave a warning though that unemployment could rise by another 200,000 by 2012, currently the jobless market is at 2.5 million and set to rise to 2.7 million by the end of 2011, however this is still way off the 3 million predicted it would reach.

It is good to see the job market seems to be on the up and we need the private sector to help out as much as possible, this may be a good time for recruitment agencies to really help with the transfer of staff form public to private sector and although the CBI still gave negative information it was actually better than forecasted.

Filed under: recruitment agencies — Goto @ 10:18

07/02/2011

Finance recruitment agencies notice skill gap

Scotland financial recruitment agencies have found that there is a skills gap in finding suitable candidates for financial services.

The report provided by the Scottish Investment Operations (SIO), showed that graduates are proving not to be up to the standard required to work in this sector. Some key problem areas were communication, grammar and numeracy.

However the view of the Scottish Government was rather different stating that there is no evidence to support this report and in fact pointed to the latest international comparisons for people at school, where Scottish youngsters faired well against the rest of the UK.

Moving forward universities are looking to work more closely with finance companies, which should in turn be good for recruitment agencies, as they are introducing more courses and diplomas to bridge this gap.

I see this as a short term problem and have no doubt that this skills gap will be filled, it is just a timing issue as Scotland tries to become more influential in financial services.

Filed under: Uncategorized — Goto @ 13:24