Unemployment tumbling makes it difficult for your business
Britains labour market powered ahead between June and August, with the unemployment rate tumbling to its lowest level since the financial crisis struck in 2008.
New figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that there were 31.1 million people in work between June and August, 359,000 higher than for a year earlier.
At the same time, there were 1.7 million people out of work. While this is good news for the country in general and great news for the UK government (who last year missed their income tax target by a whopping £33bn, can you imagine if any of us forecast that badly in our job?) it doesn’t make recruitment of Senior talent any easier.
There are not many low hanging fruit to recruit in to businesses as might have been the case in 2009 & 2010.
The War for Talent is real for the Digital Media sector
Most businesses however aren’t expecting to recruit their senior talent from the 1.7 million, they do expect to recruit from the 31.1 million in work. However, the 12%* in work who are actively looking to move isn’t anywhere near enough to meet the current demand in the industry. The days of being able to stick an advert in the Telegraph or Sunday Times, or a well-read industry publication and expect a good quality and quantity of response are long gone.
In truth the last time I got a truly great response to a national advert was 2001, I ran an advert that worked brilliantly. I used the same advert a year later and it bombed, go figure!
Not all bad news, if you know where to look
The answer is to target candidates who aren’t actively looking, the passive candidates, and the good news is;
- 13% of professionals in work are casually looking and might look at the odd job advert that pops up (online most likely and often fed through an email alert)
- 15% are using their network to keep them abreast of opportunities
- 45% are open to talking to a head-hunter or recruiter
The implication of this for you is
The majority of the potential candidate market when you are recruiting are passive, they will consider a move but won’t respond to advertising and can only be accessed if proactively contacting them in person in the right way at the right time.