special feature people and recruitment
Recruiting our way out of the storm
Since the leasing industry was hit by the economic tsunami, late summer 2008, quite a few changes have taken place in the recruiting world. Despite the continuing pessimism of the business news there are signs that the UK is showing small signs of a recovery
How does that manifest itself? In the recruitment business we are getting more vacancies and enquiries, or maybe our marketing is becoming more effective?
The general feeling from our finance clients is that business is stabilising, or even starting to recover. Over the last two years we have found it hard to motivate candidates who are already in employment to look at new positions, the overall feeling being ”better the devil you know.” However, with growing confidence we now see that some quality candidates/employees are starting to put their heads above the parapet to investigate potential opportunities. A lot of our clients are talking about recruiting this year, and are more optimistic. Where do we stand on the optimism scale? Considerably higher than 12 months ago, is our view. We have many new vacancies overall, especially in consumer finance, and banking.
One of the challenges that has not changed much is the difficulty of finding good candidates. Indeed, filling some roles in the leasing arena is in the Needle in a Haystack category! This is partly the result of many candidates leaving the industry, and partly a result of less staff training and development in recent years
It would also be fair to say that many clients are taking a tougher line on recruitment fees, and looking for additional value. We are able offer our clients a range of psychometric testing, and for each successful placement extended guarantees, and training vouchers across a broad range of topics to compliment the client’s investment.
There are lessons to be drawn from the past two years. Looking back to 2008 I suspect we, like some other businesses, were busy working the clients and candidates we knew well, and working in comfort zones. This was great until the storm hit, when 70 percent of our potential disappeared, almost overnight. One could argue that we always needed a broader prospect base. But when you are a busy specialist, with limited resources, these things are not always high on your agenda. We have learned to grow our user base to cross-sell other services within our business to our clients. One result of this work that we are particularly proud of was reaching the top level Tier 1 recruiter status for a major banking group, offering not only asset and motor finance recruitment but also consumer and personal banking. This has helped us move forward with a much wider range of recruiting opportunities, and we are updating our marketing and social networking activities to support these changes and challenges.
Looking at our industry today, it is unfortunate that many developments seem to have been in down sizing. Nevertheless there are some areas that appear to have survived the economic changes, notably small ticket sales aid and vendor leasing, which is a market where there is some potential almost certainly due to the lack of bank lending to SMEs. Our own training business has been most pro-active in captive markets, particularly in the transport and telecoms sectors. The current climate presents a real chance to deepen lease penetration in a wide range of sectors.
JULIE RAMSAY, MD, THC RECRUITMENT LTD,
WWW.THCRECRUITMENT.CO.UK
March 2011 ■
www.leasingworld.co.uk
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