What is the impact of this on recruiters filling management vacancies in China? Or should we be filling UK vacancies with Chinese managers?

Posted by Zena Everett

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After 12 weeks of an assignment, temporary and contract workers will be granted the same working conditions and rate of pay as someone recruitment to do the same job on a permanent basis.

This is on the grounds of pay and working time.  Not sick pay or pensions.

The detail now (discussion between the Government and the CBI - advised by the REC) is making this workable.  Particularly, defining who is the permanent member of staff to be compared to?  This will be decided by the employer not the agency.

Is that it, or am I missing some huge detail here?

Zena Everett

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• London is a world leading centre in financial and business services and this success is due to the availability of qualified staff.  We have access to national and internal labour pools here.
• The London job market shows greatest growth at higher level skills - in 2020 80% of jobs will be at A level level and 50% at graduate level.
• Of course, Crossrail and the 2012 Games are giving us significant new job opportunities.  But we need continued access to well qualified staff to retain global competitive advantage. 
• 17% of London employers have skills gaps, compared to 15% in the rest of the UK.  30% of working age residents NOT in employment which is higher than elsewhere in the country.  They can’t all be Clapham Mums surely?? 
• 600,000 of Londoners have NO qualifications.  A larger proportion of the workless have been out of work for more than 2 years. 
• We have a 70.5% employment rate which is the lowest in the UK - we average 5% behind the rest of the country.   And there are great disparities among communities such as Haringey and Hackney.
• So, if we lose more skilled immigrants we really have to address our skills gap issue or London employers will struggle in the future.

There seems to me to be a confusing amount of training and re-employment bodies for the long-term workless.  And, it all comes down to education and training - perhaps the recruitment industry should be working with schools, which Karl Chapman (ex-Spring) started many years ago?

Published by: Zena Everett

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Zena Everett is doing an MSc in Career Counselling. For further advice, email zena@perriam-everett.co.uk

Hiring former employees is an obvious solution for a savvy recruiter trying to find professionals and specialists in a skill short market (and we are still in one, regardless of what you may be led to believe). Persuading colleagues to return who have left for pastures new but still retain internal networks and necessary skills is a quick fix for a hard-to-fill vacancy. Logically, the people that fit best into our corporate culture are often the people that helped define that culture in the past.

When is it right to re-hire someone? When they have tested the external market, discovered that the pastures aren’t as green as they thought and become disillusioned. When they have itchy feet, but now regret leaving. Or the problem that caused them to leave has been solved – perhaps their manager has moved on, or the process that caused problems has changed. Leaving to work for another organisation, even a competitor, can make an individual more valuable when they return to their original firm. If an employee has left to pursue freelance or consulting careers their original employer will benefit from the new perspectives they will bring. In our industry, recruiters sometimes go in-house for a couple of years to hone their resourcing and stake-holder management skills then are lured back. I believe we should always work on the premise that top performers are leaving because of our ineffective management. When we can manage them effectively, we bring them back to contribute their contribution.

When is it wrong to re-hire someone? Only re-recruit your best people. We tend to maintain dialogue with our top performers anyway, not the people we were glad to lose. Re-recruitment doesn’t work with an individual didn’t fit in the first place. Bringing them back implies desperation and will poison your working environment.

How can you make the “new” relationship work? Make sure you understand what matters most to the employee and ensure that your needs and their needs are being met this time. Be wary of luring them back with financial incentives, particularly if their original reasons for leaving haven’t been addressed. What caused them to leave in the first place will inevitably resurface. Look at their original reasons for leaving (and this is why thorough exit interviews are so important), address those reasons, compromise if you have to and don’t take anything personally. Sometimes managers have to swallow their pride and say “we were wrong to lose you” rather than “I told you so!” It is a great message to your staff to say “our star performer left and has come back to us.”

2 Nicoll Curtin

3 Cobalt Recruitment

7 Jenrick Recruitment Group

11 Pure Recruitment Group

15 Macdonald & Company

18 The Chadwick Nott Group

27 PFJ (Phee Farrar Jones)

30 GCS

36 EPCglobal

45 Jobwise

57 Hewitson Walker

74 Quest Search & selection

88 Retail Human Resources

97 Tate

Anyone got an opinion on this? Is it true or do they have great PR people?

Contrary to common perception, the regulations do allow employers to retain service related benefits such as loyalty bonuses- so long as they are not age related.

While it is true, for example, that an advertisement requesting ‘five years experience’ might look like an ageist one, the regulations allow this where it is objectively justifiable. It is certainly true that many roles require that the worker has exposure to a number of situations and considerations that would be difficult to obtain in less time.

Asda has a strong emphasis on equal pay and has decided to abolish minimum wage differentiations for staff under 18. Asda does, however, reward length of service. Employees completing 25 years of service are rewarded with a gift and one additional week of holiday in that year.

Increasingly employees are attracted by flexible benefits package, and the flexibility is key to retention. While older staff are statistically more likely to select medical cover, and younger ones more likely to select car and holiday provision, we should try to avoid stereotyping at every level. Scientists predict that the biggest growth spike in our population over the next 20 years will be those living to over 100- and who knows what they might want?

Alison Humphries

Alison Humphries is MD of Amelius Consulting, a business which specialises in training, coaching and consultancy to the recruitment industry. www.Amelius Consulting.com

Practically all the participants thought that the quality of candidates is important or very important when assessing agency performance (99%). The service received from agency staff (94%) and value for money (90%) are also pivotal in this process. Most respondents agreed that using agencies considerably increased the cost of their recruitment spend. Our challenge as suppliers is to show how we add value, through providing market and competitive information for instance, rather than just costs. Interestingly only 53% of respondents thought that most agencies are legally aware and don’t discriminate!! Perhaps encouraging performance evaluation would be a step in the right direction?