Recruitment and hiring insights: May 2024

The recruitment market continues to be on the shift, but looking at the insights from May, we seem to be seeing the start of a resilient employment market and more stable role availability. Let’s dive in.
Regional role availability rose by almost 5% from last month, and 17% vs the previous three months, showing signs the market is heading back to strength.

9 out of 13 of our placements in May were sourced by us, either using our database of 22k candidates or using search tools. We work tirelessly to find the right person for every role, meeting first with the hiring business to understand their needs and goals, then with candidates to assess skillset, cultural fit and career goals.

Using this method, we hire for permanent positions on average within just 31 days, from advert to job offer.

What is interesting to see is the advert to application rate has declined slightly from the start of the year, from a high of 25 to 21 in May. However, this is still far stronger than where we were last year and in 2022 with a rockier employment market. This isn’t a surprise as applications do surge at the start of the year and dip as we head into summer. We expect this to rise again as we go into September with that ‘back to school’ feeling.

Indeed and Total Jobs saw a drop in the number of roles available on the platform, whereas there was a huge uptick in roles available via LinkedIn and a small increase via Reed. This shift in the market over recent years continue to be important for candidate attraction and it may well show us that more candidates are looking for jobs in their social time, as opposed to actively crawling job boards.
With election manifestos and promises being announced every day it seems, we are continuing to keep an eye on the employment offering from each political party and at present, there seems no slow down from businesses as we head to the general election.

That’s all for this month. Check back next month as we round up the employment market for the first half of the year.

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