Paula Reed, managing director of alphafinancialjob.com, the international job board talking about the UK job market, said in Loughborough yesterday:
‘Over the last fifteen years the financial services sector has outpaced other industries in terms of contribution to the UK’s economy and currently generates approximately 40% of total GDP. At the start of a New Year, we have come to expect a surge in the number of job vacancies, but this year, no one knew for sure what would happen. I’m delighted to report that we have been very pleasantly surprised.’
Ms Reed continued, ‘if we include the number of supportive roles in IT, HR and Legal etc that are employed in the sector, this news is most encouraging and suggests that the private sector job market is beginning to recover. The fourth quarter of 2010 did show a slow, but steady growth in Financial Sector jobs, but January figures show a good start to the New Year. At Alpha Financial Jobs, advertised vacancies increased by nearly 22% over the previous month.
We would like to think our New Year offer to recruiters contributed to this increase, said Ms Reed and I’m sure that to some extent it has encouraged new clients to try our services. However, industry colleagues have also indicated that they too have experienced an increase in advertised jobs, so no matter what, it’s great news all round.’
Ms Reed went on, ‘because we’re a niche job board operating exclusively in the financial sectors, it has given us the flexibility to be able to make some dramatic changes to advertising rates. We have always thought that the small recruiter was disadvantaged, so we decided to do something and try to level the playing field. Now, all our advertisers, irrespective of their size, can post all their job vacancies for less than what it can normally cost to advertise a single vacancy.
We may have ruffled a few feathers but this was not our intention, the bottom line is, that it should help the recruitment industry to have a better year than the last one. We’re also delighted at the fact that even our jobseekers will benefit, they now have an even greater variety of jobs to choose from.’ For more information please visit: alphafinancialjobs.com.
