There are many challenges that lie ahead for recruitment in general and IT recruitment in particular. The industry body, the Recruitment Employers Confederation (REC), has identified the general trends.

And, partly in response and partly to encourage recruiters to aspire to best practice, it has created the Good Recruitment Campaign – a free to join vehicle that encourages businesses to work towards improving their business performance through better recruitment. However, better recruitment practices depend on having the necessary people to hire in the first place…

It ought to be stressed at the outset that the recruitment industry has, for the most part, done a stupendous job in helping the UK to achieve the best employment figures ever – and least bad unemployment figures we’ve seen for decades. Yet we all know that it’s really tough just now and that often hiring managers really struggle to find the talent they need to grow and develop their businesses.

Sad to say, as we look at the available evidence, trends and projections, then add in a bit of political spice (OK, quite a lot of that), the future looks much worse. If that’s true (and it is), then this is going to impact seriously on UK plc and UK IT over the next few years.

Talent Shortage and Demographic Changes Will Impact the Recruitment Sector

Let’s start by considering the different areas of shortage. These are often broken down into the following categories: relatively unskilled labour (where a few days training gives all the skills required); skills; and talent. The distinction between the last two may seem a bit opaque, but can be explained thus: skill shortages are what they say – an absence of people with technical skills, whether in IT, engineering or medicine; talent shortages are a lack of people with those skills plus the additional attributes of good management, strategic thinking and the hard to define but nonetheless vital qualities of leadership. For IT, our future recruitment issues lie in those last two areas of skill and talent shortages.

The picture is then complicated further by a number of other factors: demographics; flexible working; millennials; and, as you would expect, the impact of Brexit (once we actually know what’s going to happen).

The demographics of the country are very important. Depending on the birth rate we have well-defined peaks and troughs of numbers coming into the workforce. What we do know is that the current demographic projections show fewer people available to work in the near future. These numbers can obviously be augmented by immigration, but, as we know, our future immigration policy is a bit of a mess just now.

Then there is flexible working. There are over five million people working in some form of self-employed basis, enjoying (mostly) the benefits of flexible working, as sole traders, SMEs and contractors, some part-time and some full-time. Businesses like this because it enables them to hire these people on a short-term or part-time basis, improving their (the businesses’) ability to work nimbly and fulfil projects while reducing costs.

Companies Need to Adapt to Changing Worker Expectations

Increasingly, people are fed up with the demands of ‘conventional‘ working – the commuting, the internal politics, managing problems etc. – and want a better life balance. The demographics of the country also kick in here, with an ageing population creating demands for their (working) offspring to take time off to care for them, thus further reducing the hours working in traditional business structures. Crucially, those who do opt out often discover they can earn as much, and sometimes more than they did previously, but with far less hassle. Unsurprisingly, more and more mid-career professionals are opting out. This, in itself, is not necessarily a problem for IT, because flexible/agile working is pretty much entrenched in a lot of IT/digital companies’ DNA.

Millennials present a further set of challenges. It is often said, sometimes accurately, that for this group the future is all about me. More pertinently, in general millennials have an ethical problem with big business. They want to be entrepreneurs, not work for Amazon, Facebook, etc. In fact, a staggering 83% of them want to be entrepreneurs. For IT this may not seem a great threat. Our industry is a hotbed of entrepreneurialism, but these savvy youngsters realise that it’s better to get some experience under their belts before heading off to make their first million. In other words, they will suck up your training for about five years and then head for the hills.

That might seem to give a window in which to consider how best to deal with this potential problem, but be aware that before working for you they want to know why they should do so. For millennials, it’s not all about money; if you want to employ them you’ll need to demonstrate that you share their concerns, their ethics and their approach to life generally. Moreover, they want to get to your jobs in two clicks or they’ll give up, and if you don’t respond quickly to them then they’ll similarly ignore you for someone who does.

Increasingly Mid-Market Jobs are Disappearing

I’m going to skirt over Brexit (not a misprint) because, as has been written ad nauseam elsewhere, we simply do not know how it’s going to turn out (the political spice I referred to above). That said, the majority opinion is that it’s not going to make things better. Certainly, if – and it’s a very big if – the government can devise a much better approach to immigration, especially for IT talent from beyond Europe, there is some hope that for our industry there may be some benefits, but based on what we’ve seen so far I wouldn’t rush to the bookies to place a bet on this just yet.

Finally, as if all this wasn’t enough, we have the additional threats of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Estimates of the number of jobs that are at risk vary widely, but some suggest that up to ten million are under threat. However, this threat is likely to play out over the next decade or two rather than over the next few years. Unfortunately, one trend we can identify is that for some considerable time now the ‘mid-market’ jobs have been disappearing. Secretarial and admin jobs are much rarer now and the REC believe that we’ll see increasing job polarity, with low and high skills jobs and fewer jobs in the middle.

This, in turn, makes it more difficult for those in lower skill jobs to progress through the middle ground to those better paid, higher skilled jobs. While less of an issue for entrepreneurial IT graduates, it’s still important to remember that our industry does not exist in a vacuum; it’s surrounded by an influenced by what goes on elsewhere in the economy. Declining economic growth due to non-IT factors will have an impact

I trust this has not seemed too doom-laden. Yes, recruitment, in general, is going to get more difficult over the next few years, for all the reasons given above. However, in these circumstances, quality IT recruitment firms should thrive if they can demonstrate that not only do they understand the background to the market (as described here) but they also know how best to respond to it and continue to deliver the candidates their clients need, both now and in the future.