This is a guest post written for us by Jamie Gavin. Jamie is Managing Director of inPress Online, a UK Media company specialising in editorial, social and video content across multiple sectors including recruitment and HR.
In a competitive jobs market it can be difficult enough to get the full picture on how competitive your own sector is, let alone the rest of the industry. For candidates applying for new roles, and particularly those embarking on new careers, it’s useful to have a rough idea of ‘risk vs. reward’ in terms of the type of role you’re looking for. Likewise for companies and agencies recruiting staff in specific sectors, just how competitive a pool are you drawing from in?
I have here taken an independent reading of the current UK jobs market using totaljobs.com, one of the leading UK online jobs boards.
It’s important to remember that this is only a single snapshot from a single site, and a data pool that swells and contracts on an almost real-time basis. There’s also a great deal of overlap in there between categories so you can’t work from the pov of a share: sales will span sectors, part-time jobs will be found across all fields, etc. But it does give us a living, working impression of how one of the largest UK jobs-sites is categorising, and listing, its jobs – and how candidates are finding them.
Sales dominates the landscape
On the 25th November this year there were a total of 126,380 jobs listed on the popular jobs-site. Of all jobs listed, sales-orientated roles provided the most opportunities with 19,536 available positions. This was followed by roles in the Construction sector (16,400), Temporary roles (14,217), and Logistics (12,987).
Again this is by no means an exact science, but it does provide us with a glimpse of what candidates are seeing in terms of breadth of opportunities, when they have a specific role or sector in mind. If you’re a recruiter specialising in a particular type of role, it may be worth for example broadening out the semantics of your listings to appeal to a wider candidate base.
| Total Number of Jobs Listed on Totaljobs.com by Categorisation
Data Snapshot: Wednesday 25th November 2015 All Categories |
|||||
| Total Jobs | 126,380 | 28. | Hospitality | 2,788 | |
| 1. | Sales | 19,536 | 29. | HR | 2,700 |
| 2. | Construction | 16,400 | 30. | Charity | 2,697 |
| 3. | Temporary | 14,217 | 31. | Banking | 1,966 |
| 4. | Logistics | 12,987 | 32. | Telecoms | 1,956 |
| 5. | Transport | 12,987 | 33. | Nursing | 1,682 |
| 6. | Travel | 12,597 | 34. | Legal | 1,670 |
| 7. | Part-time | 10,120 | 35. | Teaching | 1,585 |
| 8. | IT | 9,598 | 36. | Digital | 1,052 |
| 9. | Utilities | 8,241 | 37. | Oil and Gas | 1,037 |
| 10. | Customer Service | 8,230 | 38. | Science | 855 |
| 11. | Graduate | 7,236 | 39. | Secretarial | 806 |
| 12. | Public Sector | 7,044 | 40. | Automotive | 674 |
| 13. | Accountancy | 6,551 | 41. | Media | 597 |
| 14. | Administration | 5,770 | 42. | PA | 594 |
| 15. | Senior Appointments | 5,495 | 43. | Insurance | 561 |
| 16. | Apprenticeships | 5,467 | 44. | Wholesale | 528 |
| 17. | Engineering | 5,255 | 45. | Call Centre | 504 |
| 18. | FMCG | 5,069 | 46. | PR | 341 |
| 19. | Manufacturing | 5,069 | 47. | Creative | 284 |
| 20. | Education | 3,971 | 48. | Renewable Energy | 275 |
| 21. | Marketing | 3,731 | 49. | Property | 254 |
| 22. | Management Consultancy | 3,564 | 50. | Social Work | 239 |
| 23. | Finance | 3,389 | 51. | Tourism | 206 |
| 24. | Retail | 3,211 | 52. | Advertising | 85 |
| 25. | Recruitment Sales | 3,077 | 53. | Leisure | 54 |
| 26. | Healthcare | 2,867 | 54. | Aerospace | 22 |
| 27. | Catering | 2,788 | 55. | Pharmaceutical | 8 |
Types of employment
The site currently offers a total of 55 jobs categories, spanning a useful range of the UK employment market. Interestingly, of the 126,380 total jobs listed on the site, only 14,217 were listed as Temporary, and 10,120 were listed as Part-Time. The South East showed the highest number of vacancies with 52,700 listed. In the Public Sector, 57.0% of the total jobs advertised were for positions offering salaries of £30,000 and upwards.
Recruitment efficiency
Drilling down further into this data becomes more difficult, because it is as I say not something that provides direct comparison between sectors. But if you work in a specific sector of the UK recruitment market then it does at least provide a useful index of the popularity of the type of roles you work with and competition for positions – and candidates – within it.
And this of course is just one example. By applying greater analysis and efficiency to recruitment and cross-referencing roles with sectors the industry can begin to have a direct impact on UK employment rates, helping to determine where skills shortages and surpluses exist, and along with Government input, ultimately helping the right candidates into the right roles.
