The following post is a summarised extract from a report published jointly by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and KPMG called Labout Market Outlook (Winter 2008-09).  The report is the result of surveying almost 900 companies asking a broad range of job and economic questions.

The full report can be found at: http://www.cipd.co.uk/NR/rdonlyres/3D88488C-C287-4840-8AF8-1E638E29DADC/0/4742LMOWinterWEB.pdf 

Recruitment and Redundancy Highlights:

1. Over a third (36%) of organisations in the survey expect a decrease in staff levels (Vs 18% in the autumn survey)
2. Recruitment intentions have declined significantly over previous quarters; 62% planning to recruit compared to 75% and 86% in previous surveys.
3. One third of employers expect to make some redundancies in the next 3 months.  Primary tactics to avoid redundancies are to freeze recruitment and terminate contract staff.
4. Nearly a fifth of companies have introduced short-time working.

Salary and Wage Costs Highlights:

1. The average pay rise is expected to fall over the next few months with an average pay rise expectation of 2.6% (compared to a previous value of 3.45%).
2. The factors affecting people responsible for planning pay reviews, quoted in terms of decreasing importance are; the organisation’s financial performance, inflation versus business confidence, staff retention, rewarding high-performers and, way behind, the Government’s call for pay restraint.

Economic optimism (or not!):

1. 80% of companies believe that the economic condition of the UK will worsen over the next few months, with just 2% believing that it will improve!
2. 34% of firms think that their company’s financial performance will deteriorate in the short term. With almost half (46%) not expecting a significant change.

Coping with the credit crunch:

1. Almost two-thirds of companies experienced (or are about to) an organisational budget cut in 2008.
2. Travel budgets have been slashed or new restrictions (flights, taxis to name but two) have been put in place by many employers with many companies making use of telephone or video conferencing instead.
3. Increases in communication from top executives and senior management are also popular with many firms.

Tags: jobs, news, recruitment

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 1:31 pm and is filed under news, recruitment trends, the economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.