Well that's been pretty strange...

You know what I hear a lot at the moment; ‘what’s going on out there for in-house recruitment’?

At times in the run up to the referendum and in the immediate aftermath I was tempted to say I wish I knew!  I’m fairly sure no-one is really sure.

Given the interest it’s the first time I’ve toyed with mass communications for Aspen but talking to a number of active job seekers they discouraged us and said keep it personal and post what’s going on to LinkedIn we’ll pick it up there if we want it.

Fair enough. 

For most in-house recruiting professionals unless you’re in a huge firm with a giant recruiting team it’s a pretty lonely world.  Context is a rarity in the market, you piece together war stories and get a sense of what is going on.

A few weeks down the line from the referendum here’s what we are seeing.  Nothing hugely scientific but there is data behind this too. Let's start with the before part.

• The run up to June was the quietest we had seen the market for two years. Our monthly role volumes were averaging around 60% of last year
• Our candidate registrations were spiking. Before you get excited here on why we had only run 2 job board adverts all year, last year it was over 10 and we had database access we no longer used.  At the peak in 2016 we had over 80% more candidates to date for the year than last year.  Every week has seen our cumulative total ahead of last year too

So that’s the backdrop but before you run for cover we should share some good news too…

 The panic has subsided.  Post-BREXIT here’s the view

 Pretty much out of nowhere our vacancy levels have soared. Today they are at a record high since the business was founded

• Candidate registrations are levelling out (now around 10-15% up on last year’s totals week to week)
• There is more purpose to hiring; time to feedback on CVs is down under a day (it was over a week in Q2 at times), hiring processes are swift and purposeful, offers are getting made (not to all and not for out of this world salaries but good roles at good rates for good people)

The surge is based in a few hot spots

• If you hire software developers, you are in the right place as with last year so long as you want a salary of £35,000-50,000
• The Product Development/Design world has followed suit (at the same salary levels)
• The hiring is mainly on payroll
• There’s some interest around executive search but mainly research or delivery roles at the £40,000-50,000 mark
• It’s a little easier to jump from agency to in-house again (so long as you are a functional specialist in a high demand area and will be sourcing focused at £30,000-40,000)
• • What was going to happen post-BREXIT? Would the barriers come up?  Not a bit of it barring that one very large IT company we heard about…
    • If you speak fluent German, Polish, Czech, French, Dutch, Spanish, or Italian in London and have in-house experience it’s as good a market as it will ever be at Recruiter/Sourcer level, and if you want to be based in mainland Europe even better

And what do we need to see change?

Well the surge is based on front line demand so most of the hiring is about delivery.  Sourcing or full 360 recruiting this is still not a time for strategy, management, leadership, branding or projects so despite the surge in work you need to be in that mid-market niche to see a lot of action it can still be lonely outside it.

I hope some of this speaks to your current situation, either wondering what is going on in your business or for your own career but if you want more context do feel free to get in touch with Ellie or I, we’re always happy to chat even if we cannot directly help you right now.

Oh, and we’re hiring as well.  Come and join the team at Aspen.  If you speak a second European language of course.  Seriously though, if your idea of a dream job is to get to go to Sourcecon of SOSUEU if you perform well and you want to hire recruiting and sourcing talent around the world we’ll start with a contract but I’d expect to hire you permanently in the future if that's what we both wanted.

P.S.  This movement has not yet hit the day rate market though, that remains as quiet as we've seen it in a long time.