A Round Up of Recruitment News This Week
It has certainly been a busy week in terms of recruitment. There have been announcements of major job losses but it hasn’t all been bad news. The use of social media has also been highlighted in the recruitment industry.
1,000 jobs to go at Lloyds Banking Group
The banking industry has certainly been through some turmoil in recent years. The latest bit of bad news comes from Lloyds, which announced that almost 1,000 jobs will disappear from its banking operations in the UK.
Four offices are being closed but the remainder of the jobs are expected to be lost through natural wastage and voluntary redundancy agreements.
GAME cuts jobs at its HQ
There was further bad news for those working at the Basingstoke HQ of GAME this week. Forty six people will lose their jobs there, which accounts for one tenth of the workforce at Basingstoke. This follows on from a disappointing seasonal performance from the retailer, prompting further streamlining efforts in an attempt to improve things.
Good news at London Underground as 300 vacancies for station staff are offered
London Underground experienced a surge of applicants this week when it opened the doors to receive applications for 300 new station staff positions. It received an incredible 30,000 applications for the safety critical positions, which involve working shifts on the stations and platforms across the Underground network.
Social media is being used more and more by recruiters
A recent survey has indicated that social media is becoming more prevalent as a method for recruiting new staff. Corporate websites and internet job boards still rank as the most favoured methods, but social media is catching up fast.
LinkedIn was revealed to be the most frequently used social media site to find new candidates, used by a huge 92% of all those surveyed. Facebook came second with just 43% of respondents using it to find new staff.
“An interesting week for recruitment news”
This was the comment made by David Lyons, MD at eBoss recruitment software this week. “It’s sad to see jobs being lost at Lloyds and GAME,” he added. “The surge of applicants for 300 jobs at London Underground shows how desperate people are to find work. Unemployment is still a challenge and many employers are getting hundreds or thousands of applicants for a very few job openings. But it’s also interesting to see social media being used more by recruiters than it was in the past.”
Comment made by Warren Kemp on Feb 10th 2012 at 7:00 am:
Good post David. While the big names grab the headlines some of the smaller ones quietly continue to go about their business.c.75% of recruiters we have spoken to recently tell us they are confident of increasing their own profits in 2012. Our 2 day introduction to recruitment course (for those coming into the industry continues to see greater numbers of both attendees and events year on year since 2010.one change we see in tactics is less dependency on recruiting for the big names eg Lloyds TSB as per your article and more spread within their sectors.After all the SME’s don’t have to be growing for recruiters to earn a crust helping them resource,natural attrition does that for them.