At the beginning of this year, I saw something in the jobs market I’d never seen before in my 30-plus years in the recruitment business. The economy was growing, yet jobs vacancies were shrinking. This is not normal. Usually when the economy is growing, this goes hand in hand with job creation – but not this time. It’s particularly bad in London. The capital has, it was announced last week, the highest jobless rate in the country, hitting an 11-year high.
I’ve run Reed, Britain’s best-known recruitment company, since 1992. We employ more than 4,500 employees who work across 200 locations around the world. Reed receives 50 million job applications a year, and every year we help fill around 105,000 jobs.
