Talent wars: why businesses have to battle to hire the best
Fraser Gough could not believe his luck. Earlier this year the 23-year-old, who works in digital marketing in London, was contacted by a recruiter on the professional networking website LinkedIn to see if he would be interested in a job at Clearpay, a payments company. It was an offer he could not turn down. He got a 40 per cent pay rise to £35,000, equity in parent company Square and a series of perks. This included free gym membership, money for bills to help him manage his working from home costs, and opportunities to work in San Francisco.
“I don’t even have a degree. I’m self-taught,” says Gough, who joined in March and has been working long hours and going to great lengths to build up his knowledge in the sector. “I’m now trying to go for another raise, and I think I’ll get it.”
Despite surging inflation and fears that the UK will be heading into a prolonged recession, unemployment has stayed low and companies have continued to hire, often paying bumper wages. Even as some observers expect businesses to scale back on spending and recruiting in response to a looming slowdown in demand for goods and services, every sector — from technology to hospitality, construction and life sciences — is still experiencing a talent crunch.
A recent poll of 1,043 managers by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) showed that nearly 90 per cent said their organisation was recruiting in July 2022. Looking ahead to the next six months, almost 40 per cent said they would increase hiring, while a third said their company would continue to hire as normal.
“In the UK we have lost quite a big part of our labour force,” says Christin Owings, a managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group, observing that it was still a jobseekers’ market.
In the past couple of years, a drop in the self-employed workforce coincided with many people retiring early, and others leaving jobs after being forced into out-of-work benefits by long-term, Covid-related health issues. The pandemic also changed perceptions around work with a lot of staff embarking on new career paths, often attracted to more flexible working that can be done from home. All of this has led to more than 1.2mn vacancies in the UK, according to government data.
Fraser Gough was poached by a recruiter for a job at Clearpay © Daniel Lynch/FT
“We are coming out of an unprecedented period with the pandemic. But we are still sitting with a lot of these issues,” says Owings, speaking about the climate facing hiring managers.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Anjli Raval
