Recruitment Advice

New figures show that 25% more students are staying in education than this time last year. The research carried out by High Fliers involved around 16,000 students has found that as the job market slows up more students are enrolling for further education.

The research found that 52% of students thought that the prospects for new graduates a getting a job were very limited and 36% thought that they would not get a graduate job this year.

The survey found that teaching was the most popular career choice this year, up from third last year. the top three career choices were:

• Teaching 13.7%
• Media 13.6 %
• Marketing 12.6%

For all those Job hunters out there beware that perspective employers are increasingly checking out networking sites such as Facebook, My-space and Twitter to get information on prospective employees and what they are like outside of work?

The recruitment market is highly competitive at the moment and employers are looking at personal profiles, drunken nights out, pictures, getting a better idea of what you are like outside of the work.

These techniques are useful to check out an employees public persona, personality and of course reputation.

I personally think that i wouldn’t put anything on my Facebook that i wouldn’t want my parents to see, therefore the information available about me is limited.

With the number of unemployed reaching 2.1 million it seems that for many, finding a job is proving difficult. Although a large proportion of industries are struggling because of the recession, it hasn’t massively affected each and every one of them. There are still jobs available, maybe not in the industry you have previously worked in but a change may have to be the next move. This could just be temporary or part time job just to make sure that you can pay the bills, you may even end up enjoying it and wanting to take it up full time!

Make sure that you have a look at the popular employment websites such as Monster and Total Jobs, they have hundreds of job opportunities available in a number of different industries, from jobs for writers to jobs for financial controllers and customer service advisers.

If you are unemployed then try not to worry too much, you just need to make sure that you have a well written CV, submitted on a wide variety of job boards. Make sure that you keep your eyes peeled for jobs being advertised in papers and ask friends and families to let you know if any vacancies come up in their work place.

Tesco one of the UK’s largest supermarket retailers have announced today that they have planned to reserve some of the 11,000 jobs they will recruit for this year for the long term unemployed.

They are going to work alongside the Job Centre and Local Employee Partnership (LEP’s) to help achieve this. Tesco should see success in using this methods as they have already taken on 3,000 long-term unemployed people through these schemes before. They have not confirmed the number roles of roles that will be recruited through this scheme or when they will be recruited.

The supermarket chain is also set to double the number of apprentices it takes on next year to 1,600 places.

The budget that was announced today by Alistair Darling will cause controversy across the employment sector. The announcement included a rise in statutory redundancy pay from £350 to £380 for every year of service. He did not say when the change would happen but he did say that it was important for those who have been affected by the recession.

This may cause concerns for business who are planning on redundancies, it is a difficult time for many companies and the extra money has not been budgeted.

The budget also included £1.7billion towards funding for Job Centres to combat the growing rate of the unemployed.

The CIPD have warned the government against creating jobs rather than focusing on improving skills. The concerns are that people who have lost there job during the recession and have skills shortages will lose out in the long term because of their employability. With so many people being out of work there are alot of skills for employers to choose from when plugging the gaps in there recruitment needs.

“John Philpott, Chief Economist at the CIPD said that although many top university graduates would be joining the ranks of unemployed, training  was still essential to improve overall employability. We approached the current recession with a backlog of joblessness, and they are the ones who will be at the back of the queue when looking for work,”

According to Community Care article, one in nine social worker job vacancies in England go unfilled. The numbers which were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act have shown that on 31 January 2009 there was an average 10.9% vacancy rate in the 96 councils that responded to the magazine’s national survey - equivalent to 8,317 vacant posts in England.

The figures were given by the councils over the past two months and were published for the first time, also show a marked increase on the national vacancy rate, which has been close to 10% since 2006.

Queries have been raised to why there is a struggle to fill roles as there are so many people unemployed, is it that there is a lack of training in these areas or people do not want to work in this sector after the bad publicity that has surrounded these roles.

The Work Foundation have have advised the government to improve the budget for jobs, the new budget could be used to invest in new government projects, a short-time working scheme to help employers reduce hours whilst retaining staff and to create more public sector employment.

This call is similar to the one by the Trade Union Congress’ budget submission which outlined how £25billion of public funds would kick start growth and employment.

This sort of government funding is crucial as unemployment is still on the increase and the concerns that it could reach three million  by 2010 could happen earlier than expected if nothing is done.

Europe’s largest recruitment company Hays have reported a loss of 31% in fee income. The recruitment group are specialist is HR, IT and Finance have already announced job cuts this year of 650 and will see a further 250 job cuts over the coming months. The latest round of redundancies will mean that over 27% of the workforce will have been affected.

The Office of National Statistics will reveal next month the number of people that are out of work, this is expected to reach around 3.3 million by the end of 2010 about 10.5 of the UK’s workforce. It is expected that recruitment will stay tough over the coming years.

For most organisations the economic downturn has had an effect on business. This means that for most there has had to be job cuts and budgets have had to be slashed. In most organisations the first budget to be cut is training, as it is seen as a nice to have and not priority.

However i think that if the business is stable during a time when business is slow it should be on a list of priorities to make sure that skills gaps are highlighted and filled for when the business is busier. This is the perfect time to undertake any training courses. Internal training course are cheaper and if they can be carried out by a senior member of the team this can boost morale.

External training programmes like  management courses and training to for staff members will help retain employees and improve employee relations. The courses are designed to help improve management and leadership excellence, it helps to improve the company bottom line and helps managers increase employee performance.

For those who are unemployed attending management training courses will help to fill in the gaps in your employment history and may help you in becoming more employable in a large pool of applicants.