Recruitment: Green shoots?
The boss of Ireland's biggest online recruitment firm tells Fearghal O'Connor that there are signs of a recovery in the jobs market.
There has been a significant upturn in the number of jobs advertised online in the first three months of the year, according to the country's biggest online recruitment firm Saongroup.com. It runs the Irishjobs.ie and Jobs.ie websites and says that it has seen an upturn from multinational companies in particular.
"The first round of companies that stopped recruiting were the multinationals around March 2008," says Jane Lorigan, managing director Ireland of Saongroup.com. "Recruitment is interesting because it is a very good early indicator of what is happening economically. When companies are nervous, one of the first things they cut is recruitment. One of the last things they will do is let go staff - they will try to hold on to staff for as long as they can. So unemployment is a lagging indicator but recruitment is a primary indicator."
In March 2008 the company began to witness a sudden fall in recruitment advertising by American companies and other international companies, probably in reaction to the US market, she says. Construction had previously slowed but suddenly all sectors were being hit - IT, pharma, banking, financial services etc. Specific functions were also taking a pounding, particularly marketing.
Irishjobs set up an index looking at the five main recruitment websites to monitor how many jobs were on offer in each month. Numbers dropped constantly until April 2009, at which point Lorigan says they began to stabilise.
"There have been fluctuations and variations for the rest of 2009. Some months it would be up 3% or 4% and other months it would be down perhaps 1% or 2%. Overall by the end of the year the line was up maybe 4% or 5%," she says.
But since January she says there has been a very definite improvement. On Irishjobs.ie alone, between January and March the number of jobs from companies (as distinct from those posted by agencies) is up 23% from mid January to mid March. Lorigan says this upturn is most evident in financial services. Other strong sectors are customer service and languages. IT is also showing a 13% increase, March over January. Companies such as Quinn Group, Bank of America and Pfizer are all recruiting again.
"I don't have a crystal ball and I don't know where it is going," she says. But I do know that the international companies stopped advertising jobs before anyone else back in March 2008 and now they are restarting. It took other companies six months to realise what was going on and then they stopped too. By January 2009 every company seemed to have stopped spending on anything, not just recruitment. So the optimist in me would say that if the international companies are starting to recruit again, then a recovery is slowly happening and we will see it in waves."
Lorigan is particularly encouraged by the rise in recruitment for knowledge economy type roles. IT is one of the largest categories on Irishjobs.ie so she believes that a 13% rise is very significant, as is the 15% rise in pharmaceutical job adverts. Another area that has seen significant growth in recent times is online gaming and betting.
"I find it really encouraging that where we are seeing the increase is in the professional levels," she says. "They are roles that are in the knowledge economy attracting a highly educated very experienced workforce."
But there are encouraging signs for lower skilled roles as well, with sister site Jobs.ie also seeing an upturn. It strongly features sectors such as hospitality, retail, catering, beauty and leisure. Nevertheless, there has been a big change in the source of traffic onto both websites.
Previously, at least 10% of traffic came from abroad, particularly places like Poland, India, France and Germany. But that traffic has disappeared and been replaced by jobseekers in Ireland, north and south.
And certain sectors are showing no signs of recovery. Construction, architecture, publishing, media, creative arts and legal all remain way down.
"People seeking employment in these industries may need to look at retraining, reskilling and new opportunities but most other sectors are bouncing back," she says. "There is a lot more emphasis now on professional IT certification. Before somebody may not have bothered getting their Microsoft certification for example. Anecdotedly I have also heard that there are opportunities for people to move from construction into renewables, wind farms etc. but it hasn't translated into a significant number of roles as yet."
Graduates too are still struggling and emigration is becoming an increasing feature of life for the under 25s. But Lorigan believes that going abroad for work is not necessarily the disaster it is sometimes made out to be.
"Is going abroad for a year necessarily such a bad thing? I certainly did it. If people are going away and it is like the 1950s and they are never going to come back well then that is a tragedy. If people are going away for a couple of years, gaining experience, picking up language skills, learning new ways of doing things and then coming back and bringing new ideas and skills with them then it is not really neccessarily such a bad thing."
And Lorigan has some advice for jobseekers, regardless of their experience. Given that it is still very much a recruiters market, she believes that candidates must give themselves the optimum chance by preparing CVs properly and doing the proper research before an interview.
"We got into some really bad habits in 2006 / 2007 - not showing up for interviews, taking a job and not showing up on the first day. There were so many jobs around people felt it didn't matter. That hopefully has changed," she says.
Irishjobs.ie
Key facts
- Denis O'Brien and Leslie Buckley bought Irishjobs.ie in 1998 and established Saongroup.com. It has since expanded into China, India, South Africa, the Gulf, Caribbean, and Central America.
- Saongroup.com has recently moved into online dating with maybefriends.com
Saongroup.com latest published group revenue is for 2008 when it had sales of €33m, a 34% increase on the previous year.
- IrishJobs.ie currently advertises close to 20,000 job vacancies sourced from nearly 1,000 active clients. According to the latest ABCe audit figures (January 2008), IrishJobs.ie has 10,753,187 page impressions, from 963,397 visits to the site by over 526,000 different jobseekers per month.
- According to figures compiled by the company, 37% of jobs advertised on the main Irish recruitment websites are in Dublin, with Cork a distant second at 10%.
