The UK labour market: How did it end up like this?
The business news that matters.
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Off to Lunch…
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has released its quarterly Labour Market Outlook report gauging the UK’s labour market. Surveying 2,000 employers, the report has revealed that more employees are staying put, vacancies are levelling off and employers are looking to retention over recruitment.
Over half (55 per cent) of the surveyed employers said that they were looking to maintain their current staffing level, with 11 per cent saying that they were looking to decrease their headcount. 30 per cent said they were looking to increase the size of their workforce, which is down from 37 per cent in the previous quarter. Looking ahead, over two-thirds (67 per cent) of employers plan to recruit in the next three months.
An interesting graph from the report looks at the percentage of employees in a job for less than a year.
The number dropped significantly in early 2021, with furlough given as the primary cause. Then the so-called ‘great resignation’ kicked in and the employee shuffle took hold with a peak of just over 18 per cent in the summer of 2022. This number also coincides with a spike in vacancies (below) but, as both figures continue to level off, there may be a factor that skews the statistics.
Career resources company StandOut CV last year found that more than a third of job listings were ghost jobs. These aren’t vacancies for jobs working closely with Derek Acorah, they are job listings that are fake or simply never intended to lead to a hire. Reasons can be a harmless “forgot to take down the listing for a position we’re not hiring for anymore” and maintaining a pool of candidates to dip into at a later date, to slightly more underhanded realities.
A survey of business owners by Clarify Capital found the reasons for these ghost job listings:
To keep current employees motivated
To give the impression that the company is growing
To placate overworked employees
Back to the CIPD report and 37 per cent of employers have said they have struggled to fill certain job vacancies. This “hard-to-fill“ vacancy problem is heightened in manufacturing (51 per cent) and construction (41 per cent), but education comes out top with 58 per cent.
Employers who have struggled with hard-to-fill vacancies in the past six months have taken measures such as upskilling existing staff (52 per cent), raising wages (41 per cent) and increasing the duties of existing staff (36 per cent) to cope with the deficit.
"The great resignation is well and truly over,” says the CIPD’s labour market economist James Cockett. “It has been replaced by the ‘big stay', with more people opting for job stability.”
You can read the full report from the CIPD here.
Podcast…
The latest episode of the Business Leader Podcast focuses on one of the most famous brands in the world.
Josh Bayliss was appointed as the chief executive of Virgin Group by Sir Richard Branson in 2011. He works with an array of Virgin-branded businesses and is responsible for 70,000 employees but has just one shareholder – the Branson family. It is a unique job with unique challenges and unique opportunities.
This is the story behind the Virgin brand and how Bayliss ended up running it
You can listen to the episode on Substack here, Spotify here and Apple here
Other stories that matter…
1. News around the much-maligned London Stock Exchange may be taking a positive turn with rumours of two blockbuster IPOs on the horizon. Its deputy chief executive Charlie Walker told City AM last week that “the pipeline is becoming increasingly encouraging”. And now listings from fast fashion retailer Shein and Cambridge-based computer firm Raspberry Pi could be coming in a matter of weeks. You can read more here.
2. The Times has taken an interesting look into what it’s calling Mark Zuckerberg’s “$173bn midlife crisis”. The billionaire Meta founder turns 40 tomorrow and is in the process of developing a 1,400-acre beachfront compound in Hawaii, dubbed “the world’s most expensive home“. You can read more here.
3. Rishi Sunak has said that the country is “at a crossroads" ahead of "some of the most dangerous years" in a speech today. The prime minister’s speech comes a few days after The Guardian revealed the party has marked 200 constituencies held by Conservative MPs as vulnerable in the upcoming general election and worthy of extra support from party HQ. You can read more here.
4. With the global M&A market picking up in Q1, data from financial markets platform Dealogic has found that London-listed companies have received more than $78bn (£62.2bn) worth of bids this year. Bumper deals involving Darktrace, DS Smith and Virgin Money has seen takeover interest in UK companies hit its highest point since 2018. You can read more here.
5. Move aside LinkedIn, there’s a new kid on the block. The Economist has done a deep dive into the rise of Gen-Z jobseekers turning to TikTok. With over 84,000 posts related to #CareerTok alone, maybe it’s time to consider the platform for recruitment as well as entertainment. You can read the piece here.
And finally…
The Times has looked into the extraordinary success of The Killers’ song Mr Brightside. Despite selling just 500 CDs after its initial release in 2003, the song has spent more top time in the UK’s Official Charts than any other and has overtaken Oasis’s Wonderwall as the best-selling song to never make it to number one.
You can read the piece here.
Go on… open up your eager eyes and add to the 561 million views the music video has had on YouTube…
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