Sector spotlight: recruitment

Fact… 

• Bristol is home to 250,000 workers, with an unemployment rate of 5.3 per cent
• 15 per cent of employment in Bristol is in the retail sector
• The average Bristol salary grew by 4.2 per cent in 2015, compared to a 2.5 per cent growth in London.

MAJOR PLAYERS

Randstad, Hays, Adecco, Robert Half, Manpower and Michael Page are among some of the national companies with a presence in Bristol. The ReThink Group, with a collective turnover of £140m, has one of its four branches in Bristol.

Bristol has one of the UK’s most thriving job markets with the highest number of vacancies in the South West, says Ruth Jacobs, managing director of Randstad Technologies. The company reports hundreds of jobs in areas like construction and education but says they’ve found “technology workers in particular are being sucked towards London, leaving IT development roles in demand”. 

“The type of jobs employers in Bristol want to fill in 2017 are technology ones like those in .net, C# and Java,” she elaborates.

RSG recruitment employs 140 people of its total 225 staff in its Bristol headquarters. With nine offices worldwide, last year it turned over £267m.

“Financial services are huge for us with key clients including Royal London, Lloyds Banking Group, Sainsbury’s Bank and Jelf,” says managing director Jon Ball. “We also work with large clients in digital, government and defence and finance.”

He also points to the digital skills shortage as a key issue facing the industry: “The Commons Science and Technology Committee reckons the UK needs another 745,000 workers with digital skills by 2017. That’s a city the size of Leeds. It’s 65,000 more than everyone currently living in the county of Wiltshire.”

But if anyone can stare down the skills shortage unflinching, it’s Bristol’s stoic workforce: “Interestingly we recently carried out some research which showed Bristolian workers are, by far, the least likely to moan about their boss of all the major cities in the UK,” says Jon.

Recent research by Hays has found the pressure on salaries intensifying, with more than half (58 per cent) of employees in Bristol dissatisfied with pay and around a quarter (24 per cent) intending to quit this year because of it. “Professionals working in accountancy, marketing and office support roles are in particular demand and are seeing salary increases above the regional average as demand for these skills intensifies,” says Hays regional managing director Simon Winfield.

“Salary increases in the South West have been among the highest in the UK,” but, “with employee dissatisfaction growing employers are expected to come under intense pressure to raise pay further and provide clear career paths in order to retain and attract the talent needed to meet the demands of post-referendum business challenges.”

ADLIB has been recruiting for 15 years, concentrating efforts on the digital, marketing, creative, technology, ecommerce and UX industries. It’s 20-strong team turned over £3.2m last year. Managing director of senior agency and special projects, Nick Dean, says business is “booming”, particularly in the digital sector which has welcomed an influx of London-based businesses.

“Demand for talent within the digital technology sector is at an all-time high. Vacancies have come from across the board – digital agencies, start-ups, established brands, multichannel businesses, you name it.

“In 2015, we recorded a 10 per cent rise in the number of vacancies registered compared to 2014, with 48.7 per cent of creative roles that crossed our desks being purely digital. 2016 stats are not quite in, but numbers are expected to shape up even higher.”

That’s in the context of a well-documented skills shortage in the technology arena, which should keep the team busy in 2017.

MID-SIZED

Leah Burrows, director of Flair 4 recruitment which specialises in marketing, finance, legal and support roles, says 2016 has been “a highly unusual year”, “with seismic shifts in the political and economic landscape shaking the recruitment market up.”

She recounts a strong start to the year followed by a noticeable lull as the EU referendum approached, which persisted through the summer as companies took stock of the result and “pressed pause” on recruitment.

The graduate market is particularly strong. “A significant rise in graduate vacancies during 2016 takes recruitment beyond the pre-recession peak in the graduate job market in 2007, to its highest-ever level.

“There has been a noticeable rise in the number of graduates turning down or reneging on job offers, leaving a high number graduate vacancies unfilled. Talented graduates are often spoilt for choice with job offers” – good news for salary levels. 

ISL Recruitment identifies digital and tech opportunities as the brawniest growth areas: “Any candidates involved in robotics, drones, autonomous vehicles, and cyber security are likely to see strong growth in 2017,” says director Alan Furley. “For the technical roles then it’s particularly challenging to find someone who not only understands the latest technologies, but can link this to what the business wants to achieve and make sure it’s communicated in the right way.”

Juice Recruitment was founded 18 years ago by Emma Summers with two members of staff in a small office in Bath. Today the company employs 26 people and over 350 temporary employees across the South West with branches in Bath, Bristol, Cheltenham and Trowbridge. To mark its coming of age Emma has launched a new creative division and announced plans to open new branches in Exeter, Cardiff and Oxford.

Fellow female entrepreneur Lucy Bristow established her business 28 years ago, and says she’s noticed a lot of changes in the sector, notably the technology. “Don’t get me wrong, I loved my electric typewriter but it couldn’t help me engage with clients via social media, access a more diverse range of candidates, or work in the efficient, streamlined way modern technology can,” she says. “It’s now all about finding potential candidates on job boards and social networks. LinkedIn alone has changed the way we search for both active and passive candidates in today’s recruitment market with almost 400 million users and 2 new members signing up every second. 

“And the technology just keeps on coming. According to a report from Deloitte, recruitment is one sector that will benefit from integrated apps in the coming year as well as video technology, cloud migration and even WhatsApp conversations.”

She’s excited about the future as the millennial workforce starts to dominate. “Generation Y and millennials currently make up around one third of the workforce and in a decade, that figure will be around three-quarters.

“This is a workforce who place more emphasis on work-life balance than salary, who looks at a company’s corporate social responsibility and culture before job titles. And let’s not forget that this generation has never been offline. Managers need to be more in touch with what’s important to their workforce, listen to their employees, and nurture them so they can progress. If not, retention rates will plummet.” 

SPECIALISTS 

The city’s distinct industry segments bring with them a number of specialist recruitment agencies, including TSR Legal, ITS Construction, Hunter Selection and Xist4.

Rise Technical focuses on engineering and technical professionals, placing people in permanent and contract roles across the UK. Remarkably, it has doubled its headcount, turnover and profit year-on-year for five years and in 2015 was ranked as the 51st fastest growing company in the country according to the Sunday Times Virgin Fast Track 100. 

IT recruiter Tria Recruitment has moved from serviced offices on Great George Street to a space on College Green as it anticipates almost doubling its staff in the next 18 months.

INNOVATORS

There’s an Uber for everything these days, including job hunting. Limber launched as an app in late 2016 to match employers with local rated, temporary employees. Staff earn a minimum of £8 an hour and are rated at their end of their shift, with black marks for no shows. Hirers gain flexibility and can quickly fill last-minute shifts without having to resort to zero hours contracts. 

In a similar vein, Job Today is a new job hunting app that promises to help people find work within a day in the retail and hospitality sectors. Already active in Spain and other UK cities, it has so far processed more than 1m job applications. Thousands of small and medium sized companies in the retail, hospitality and other service industry sectors already offer a range of full and part time jobs through the app, including The Burger Joint, Salt Cafe, Pepenero and The Clifton Sausage.

Shane Prosser at PF International in Bristol, said: “Having used the Job Today App for just over a week we have filled 3 vacancies that we needed to in a much shorter time period than the current methods of recruiting we are currently using. We have already recommended to other businesses in our local area who have shared similar success.”

Main image – the ReThink Bristol team 

Read more: Business surgery: limber