A European Perspective
With the first three guests contributing perspectives from the US, hopefully my perspective can offer something a little different, given I’m sitting here in the UK. Secondly, whilst I’ve been in search firms for the past 18 years, this year has been an interesting one for me as I spent the first six months of the year working in an inhouse executive search team at one of the major US banks and in the past three months launched my own search business (it’s been a busy year!).
Clearly here in Europe we have some major challenges that are shaping the market. With the war in Ukraine, an energy crisis that’s threatening to disrupt the European economy and interest rates rising to levels not seen for over a decade, plus a lot of political uncertainties - it’s having a big impact on overall sentiment which invariably will feed into lower investment, revenue, and profitability of firms.
That said, 2022 has been an incredible year for hiring activity. The first six months were like no other, with movement across the board in all industries and regions. Following the seasonal summer lull, it feels as though firms still have plenty to do. However, it does feel as though there is now more caution. We are seeing a few firms pausing their hiring and reviewing what hires are real priorities. In some extremes, there are firms with a hiring freeze and we’re all aware of there being a number out there that have cutbacks underway.
Biggest areas of hiring focus / types of roles
At risk of playing buzzword bingo, I still think there are some consistent talent challenges that a lot of firms are wrestling with. Typically, these are all centred around common topics, which at the heart of the matter is the need for businesses to be more flexible, change faster, be more customer centric, innovate quicker, and in a digital world - be resilient to the plethora of risks related to cyber security and operational risk.
Saying the above, I think it’s fair to say that consistently there is a significant appetite for senior leaders with experience of delivering public cloud adoption - to organisations with a more traditional, legacy technology environment. Without doubt as we head into the tail end of 2022 and into 2023 we can expect to see a continued demand for cloud engineering talent, architects & SREs. Then as businesses are enabled to leverage their technology assets more effectively the demand will continue to grow for those individuals who can gain insights and develop highly customisable client solutions through data science and AI.
Something that’s been particularly noticeable throughout 2022 has been the heightened focus on resilience and operational risk. Linked to the above and knock on from the pandemic and shift in remote working, where we’re seeing a lot of emphasis on technology risk and control hiring across firms.
None of the above, I’m sure, will come as a surprise, the only thing I’d add though is that as the market does soften considering the challenges, we can anticipate added scrutiny on hiring as we go into next year.
Remote working
This part isn’t so much my expectation on what will happen, as much as I am intrigued to see how this plays out over the next year or two and something that will continue to feature as a topic for talent acquisition. I think it’s one of the most fascinating things impacting the talent landscape and war for talent for some time. As a recruiter I see the opportunity that comes from hiring remote talent (tapping into new talent pools, improving diversity of teams, labour arbitrage etc), however there are clear challenges linked to this at the same time.
As we go through 2023 it’s going to be interesting to see how employers and employees continue to adapt how they are working. If the market does soften over the next few months, will this impact the way in which organisations expect their employees to work? Will employees adjust their way or working? Those candidates that have been adamant that they won’t consider a role that isn’t remote or at least primarily remote, will they change their views?
Personally, I’ve seen great benefits to my work-life balance since the pandemic and hope we don’t go fully back to the way that we previously operated – but if the demand for talent does slow down slightly, will this lead to another shift in working patterns?
