We’ve got our collective fingers on the pulse of what’s going on in the recruitment world.
It is a complex web of intrigue but just for you, we’re going to try and make some sense of it all, peel back the layers and unravel the yarn of confusion with the lowdown on what’s been happening this month in the sectors we cover.
Social Housing
The Financial Times reported that in October 2017, Theresa May vowed that the state would ‘get back in the business’ of building social housing to address the crisis of 1.2m families (not people – families) sitting on social housing waiting lists. It was the first time in eight years a government has explicitly committed to fund social housing to the tune of £2bn but five months’ on, says Paul Dennett, the mayor of Salford in Greater Manchester, ‘guidelines for the allocation of grants have not been published and no date has been set for when this funding will be made available.’
In the same week, an article in the New Statesman suggests that with local authorities unable to pick up the social housing baton, private investment firms are. One such example is Civitas Social Housing who offer a long-term, low-risk investment opportunity to private investors. Chief Executive Paul Bridge said, ‘There’s an enormous demand for social housing that’s been unmet’ and with the current government’s (some would say laughably) ambitious pledge to build 300,000 new homes a year up from a frankly pathetic 5,380 in FY2016-17, the race is on.
What does this mean for the world of recruitment? Well, someone’s going to be building these houses, whether it’s the government or any number of private firms, and they are going to need more and more people to lay the foundations, manage the finances, maintain the sites and look after the tenants.
Construction
‘One of the biggest culprits for gender imbalance is construction, considered one of the worst sectors for female employees,’ writes Mark Robinson in Construction News. Women make up only 12.6% of the industry’s workforce so why aren’t more women coming into construction?
Even though it’s 2018, these reasons may as well have come from the 1970s; ‘inappropriate male comments, missed promotion opportunities and unconscious bias driven by misguided cultures all deterred women from entering construction careers.’ Ironically, a recent report by Randstad suggested ‘93% of the existing workforce say that having female senior leadership would maintain or improve standards of work.’
But, and this is a big BUT; the seeds of growth are there in the form of 37% of new entrants into the industry are university-educated women and not-for-profits such as Women Into Construction are providing bespoke support and training to women who want to work in construction.
There’s more to construction that laying bricks, fitting pipes and builder’s tea. Look through our vacancies and see for yourself.
Residential Property Sales
Look around you. Every spare square inch of land that doesn’t already have a housing development on it soon will have. Prime property in Central London has fallen by a little over 1% since the start of 2018 but affordable private housing is shooting up at a rate of knots. To that end, we cover jobs for resi property pros at all levels of experience, from regeneration visionaries to surveyors, sales negotiators, housing officers, PMs, home ownership and leasehold staff and client liaison.
Graduate Recruitment
**BREAKING NEWS** According to a recent report by HR firm Emerging, companies want graduates with degrees from the world’s top universities. In other news, we want a chicken that lays golden eggs, but we don’t always get what we want.
Andrew Formica, the CEO of Janus Henderson, one of the world’s largest investment houses says that current recruitment practices, especially in financial services and asset management, focus heavily on Oxbridge graduates but there appears to be a shift in the hiring process. Companies are now looking at character rather than achievement.
In the good ol’ days, graduates were hired and if they were asked to do something, the only acceptable response was ‘yes sir.’ Now it’s more of a two-way street. Millennials, Formica says, ‘want to be listened to. He continues, ‘Young people now have a greater sense of importance about getting their voices heard. They are much more vocal about sharing their views and challenging those in authority. We need to be open to that.’
Office Recruitment
We talk to our candidates throughout the recruitment process and one of their biggest bugbears is reading that entry- or junior-level jobs require experience. It’s recruitment’s vicious circle. How do you get a job without having experience and how do you get experience without a job?
One person we spoke to applied for a job with the word ‘junior’ in the title not realising that it required seven years’ experience, a Masters degree and professional qualifications. Another entry-level position required the candidate to have completed three separate internships and two years’ experience.
One of the UKs top recruitment businesses decided to delve a little deeper into what ‘entry-level’ actually means and in a sample of over 93,000 jobs, two-thirds of all full-time roles asked for three or more years’ of experience.
Eh? What does that even mean? What are your experiences of the hiring process at the junior level? Did you find it easy to get a job or were/are you stuck in the horrendous vortex that is the employment vicious circle? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter.
Anyway, we’ll be back with some more great water-cooler stuff in a couple of weeks but in the meantime we won’t mince our words, have a butcher’s through our vacancies to see if there’s anything that ‘meats’ your needs.
Sorry.
Catch you soon.
The Liquid Team
