Major decisions and choices are beginning to dominate the landscape for many of us. More important even than choosing quietly to forget December’s New Year’s resolutions, or choosing to ignore the prevailing doom and gloom of Blue Monday, we have potentially the closest, most varied, most unpredictable election the UK has perhaps ever experienced looming into view. What choice will you and the rest of the country make? What choice will the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee come to over interest rates? And perhaps the question influencing most acutely both the previous ones – what decisions are keeping the price of oil as low as it currently sits?
The choice made by Saudi Arabia and other key Gulf states not to reduce supply and therefore increase oil prices has delivered any number of upsides to the UK economy. Quite apart from the price per litre of petrol falling below three figures, at least for one garage in Birmingham, inflation is now down to 0.5% (its lowest level since 2000) and UK company profitability hit a 16 year high in December. Further afield, the IMF estimates that oil prices at their current level will add a chunky 0.8% to global output this year. Early in 2014’s final quarter, UK growth for this year was forecast to hit 2.4%. Those estimates, given the current oil price have already been nudged up to 2.9%.
Nearly all good news then for UK commercial organisations – certainly if they choose to reach out and engage with both their current employee base and the ones they are likely to require to cope with increasing customer demand.
This sense of employment choice – perhaps the clearest one for a decade – is becoming increasingly apparent for talent. Robert Half, the accountancy recruiter, suggested that their clients had witnessed a 65% increase in the number of counter offers over the course of 2014. And a figure from our last blog is worth repeating in the present context – the percentage of employees in the UK workforce looking to move jobs nearly doubled to 37% as we entered the new year on an annualised basis. Figures like that suggest both winners and losers for employer branding competitors – more people will leave employees and more people are on the job market. Importantly, over a third of the labour force feel as though they have employment choice. And an employment choice they want to exercise. A figure which has doubled in just 12 months.
But those figures, we would suggest, do not include students in their final year at university about to come onto the job market. This is a fascinating generation of students. Those leaving university in summer 2015 are the first to pay the higher tuition fees. They have also come of age in confusing, contradictory times – from the grimmest recession of several generations between 2009-11, to one of the sharpest employment recoveries possibly ever experienced over the last two years.
(The extent of this recovery might be evidenced by the contrast between the IMF’s criticism of George Osborne’s austerity measures of 2013, to Christine Lagarde’s description just this week of Britain ‘leading in a very eloquent and convincing way in the European Union’).
According to a recent High Fliers report, graduating students will enter the most buoyant jobs market in the last ten years. They have many more choices than their elder brothers and sisters had. But is this depth and richness of choice something they realise or recognise?
TMP is lucky enough to spend time on campus across the UK as well as further afield. Our most recent series of focus groups with final year students point to both a paucity and a lack of choice. They feel the jobs market has yet to return with any vigour. Influencing this is their view that campus hiring is dominated by a few major recruiters whose presence tends to obscure the efforts of others. No surprise then that the Big 4, the major financial institutions and the odd energy company dominate. Such is the extent of this domination, that final years assume that few other organisations are out there and interested in their hearts, minds and applications. According to the survey, 2014 saw 7.9% more graduate jobs offered and this year looks even more bountiful with an additional 8.1% hike in jobs on offer.
Plenty of employment choice you might think and a good time to be 21 all over again. Not for our student audiences. They see little breadth of choice and a field dominated by a relatively small number of major players. Worse, perhaps, because they feel their choice is limited, they take a pessimistic view as to how many jobs are waiting post university.
As skill shortages bite, as candidate availability dwindles, as experienced hires feel they have more job choice than for some time, as wages and counter-offers increase accordingly, recruiters need to be mindful of a campus audience which is blissfully unaware of this richness of choice.
The winners in the entry level talent wars will be both those students who appreciate the sense of choice they now have and those employers who are able to communicate clearly and with differentiation this breadth of choice to them.
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 