One million; that’s the current number of UK job vacancies. While unemployment rates in the United Kingdom have fallen to an all-time low, there are a record number of job vacancies. For those of you wondering, that’s an average of eight job seekers for every open position. While this predicament seems to favor the employer-side, if you require information technology candidates, brace yourself, it’s going to be a bleak year.
Industries Leading the Charge
Two industries that are leading the charge in both growth and opportunity are engineering and IT jobs; although I will focus on the IT industry in this post. With this in mind, I'd like to provide you with some inside tips and best practices to assist in IT recruiting efforts.
One site you might explore is IT Jobs Watch. This online site follows the UK IT job market conditions, and each month, aggregates the top IT jobs in the industry; see graphic below. For organizations who avidly hire IT candidates, this is a great resource to anticipate the IT positions that will be difficult (and most expensive) to fill.
Taking this a step further, recently IT Jobs Watch translated IT salaries from the fourth quarter of 2014 into this handy infographic. Pro tip for IT Hiring Managers: your recruiters should be presenting you with these statistics. Not only is it important to set realistic expectations, but it’s vital to understand where you stand against your competition.
Alas, the talent crunch doesn’t stop at IT staffing. UK professional recruitment firms are feeling the pinch as well. According to the APSCo (The Association of Professional Staffing Companies),
“Permanent vacancies across finance & accounting, IT, engineering and media & marketing are all up year-on-year (17%, 28%, 50% and 19% respectively).”
The APSCo survey goes on to reveal that professional recruitment firms are faced with 27% more vacancies this year than the last. With regards to IT, there are several key factors driving demand for more jobs and candidates.
UK IT Jobs In-demand
The insights below were compiled by our UK IT Recruitment Firm.
The Double Agent
Whether establishing offices or creating remote positions, UK and US security technology businesses are expanding into Europe. For this reason, bilingual IT sales candidates with European languages such as German, French, Swedish or Italian are highly sough-after candidates.
The Heavy Hitter
According to our UK IT recruitment office, the demand for IT infrastructure skills surrounding cybersecurity and policy are red hot. Companies are responding to the press around high profile security breaches. Whether this is privacy experience or penetration testing, there is a big demand in all areas for contract staff, as well as permanent people.
Emerging Market Leaders
The following skills/job titles cover emerging markets in the IT Security space. Where do these positions rank within your organization?
- QSA (Perm salaries up 9% since 12 months ago)
- Penetration Test Consultant (Perm salaries up 18% since 12 months ago)
- CLAS Consultants (Perm salaries up 21% since 12 months ago)
- Data Privacy (Perm salaries up 14% over the last 12 months)
- Data Protection (Steady demand over the last 12 months)
- Security Architects (No change in salaries but demand is up for contractors)
- Network Security Engineers (Salaries up 5% in the last 12 months)
- Security Consultant (Salaries up 12% in the last 12 months)
- Internal/Inside Sales (Demand steady over the last 12 months)
Where to Find IT Talent
It should be of no surprise that in such a high demand market, the best candidates never “look” for work. For that reason, I recommend that IT Hiring Managers ramp recruiting to actively pursue passive candidates, or already employed talent not actively looking for work. If ramping up on IT recruitment efforts, be sure to bring on recruiters who come with a proven and established network to fulfill the specific requirements of your organization. This will involve taking a deep dive to get to the bottom of your IT staffing needs.
Depending on the number of open vacancies and the degree of difficulty in sourcing quality hires, some organizations may find it necessary to shift sourcing efforts to an IT recruitment firm. One of the benefits of working with recruitment agencies who really understand the market is immediate access to the best talent. Need another benefit? IT recruitment agencies work in specialist markets. Meaning, candidates can be professionally referenced checked through expert consultants before clients meet them for an interview. This saves you time and money if they were to interview or even avoid hiring the wrong people.
This blog was written by James Parkin, IT Business Director for Yoh UK and a man with a passion for all things recruitment related (sadly). Having spent 11 years in the UK recruitment industry he has seen the markets change and change back again as well as fads come and go. His responsibility and passion is driving the strategy for the UK business for Yoh and creating a service that our clients and candidates enjoy using. He is also one of the organisers of the annual UK Agile Awards.
