More Job Opportunities But Don’t Pop The Champagne Corks Yet

According to a report in the FT  UK graduate job opportunities are rising, leading to a return to pre-crisis (2007) levels of university leavers employment opportunities. A survey of the UK’s top 100 companies including Rolls Royce, Sainsbury’s and the BBC says graduate vacancies will see their largest annual growth since 2009. Martin Birchall, Managing Director of High Fliers Research, said that the prospects for graduates leaving university this year are the best they’ve been since the start of the recession. There will also be a rise in the number of paid internships at top companies with 11,000 placements available for first and second year students. Government ministers have claimed that the rising vacancies are a sign of confidence in the growing UK economy.

The terrific increase in vacancies in the City of London figures for November and December provided a buoyant end to 2013. While good news, Mark Cameron, Astbury Marsden’s Chief Operating Officer said “There is no popping of champagne corks yet. What drives a lot of the volume of recruitment in the City is the investment banks and they’ve still got some business challenges to work through before they consider growing.” The growth is mainly coming from smaller and mid-cap financial companies. The strong end to the year does not hide the fact that less jobs were created in 2013 (27,915) than in 2012 (35,115). It merely suggests a slowdown in the contraction.

The UK’s largest recruiters are all experiencing a rise in gross profits. Both Hays and Robert Walters reported strong growth in the fourth quarter of 2013 in permanent contracts. These optimistic green shoots in the recruitment sector need to be tempered with the knowledge that the European economy is still sluggish.

There may well be a technological disrupter on the horizon for the recruitment market that could result in a reduction of profits. Recruitment software company Jobbio has just opened offices in Dublin and London. According to TechCentral

The website is free to join for candidates and companies, who can post as many open vacancies as they like. The service’s revenue model is based on charging companies on a ‘pay per hire’ basis with prices starting at €2.

Candidate features include personalised ‘job streams’ where relevant position are displayed to candidates similar to Facebook news feeds and ‘live bios’ which remove the need for CVs and can be browsed anonymously by recruiters.

UK technology investors MXC Capital are backing Jobbio. Will they succeed? Wait and see.

In the meantime if you need a visa to work in IT, Engineering, or Finance then Commonwealth Contractors may well be able to help.

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