Buoyant jobs market an unexpected Covid legacy

The jobs market is said to be exceptionally buoyant, with unprecedented demand from both companies and candidates.

At 1st Recruitment, director Suzy de Norbrega said the company was expanding its own team to keep pace with a record hiring spree.

‘It’s absolutely manically busy for us. We would always expect January to be a busy month but this year it’s been off the scale.

‘We had one quiet day after the bank holiday and then it went to 90 miles an hour literally overnight – and we’ve not really stopped for breath since.

‘We’ve got a huge number of vacancies – and we’ve also found that from the beginning of this year there’s been a huge number of people looking as well.’

The tight labour market is one of the unexpected legacies of Covid-19 – instead of unemployment rising, the opposite has happened.

Latest figures showed that at the end of December there were 313 islanders registered as unemployed, which is lower than pre-pandemic figures.

The number of vacancies advertised at the Job Centre dropped by more than half over the month.

The fund and trust sectors have been the bread and butter of Guernsey’s finance industry and that looks set to continue, with particular pressure in those areas.

Mrs de Norbrega said a super-charged market could also be viewed as a positive sign.

‘It’s very easy to focus on the recruitment crisis, but looking at it positively it’s a nice problem to have that business is so buoyant.

‘The fact that we’ve got all these roles to fill is testament to the fund and the trust sectors doing so well over here.

‘And the States is becoming more receptive to granting licences for the more junior roles.

‘Historically we would never have been able to get a licence for a fund administrator, for example.

‘But now we’re finding we can and they’re turning those around much quicker as well.

‘We’ve got interviews this week for company secretarial candidates from South Africa because we just don’t have enough candidates in Guernsey.

‘Some employers are more geared up to recruiting outside of Guernsey than others, but I think that’s just a case of getting the message out to the wider business community that the licensing situation is nowhere near as expensive, onerous and time-consuming as perhaps it once was.’

At Situations Recruitment Agency it is a similar picture, managing director Melissa Campbell said it was extremely busy.

‘We have hundreds of Guernsey vacancies and more coming in every day, and candidate enquiries are through the roof, it’s more than we’ve ever seen.

‘We mainly deal with the finance sector, although we do have some commercial roles. It’s all office positions and the finance sector is extremely buoyant, and we’re seeing the candidates as well as the jobs, so I wouldn’t call it a crisis. I’d call it very buoyant.

‘Some salaries are inflated, so companies are going a bit higher than they would normally go to get the right person, and certain fields like trust and mid-level roles are very hard to fill, so that’s a particular area where salaries may be inflated.’