This year’s daft December story goes to the Recruitment agency Logical Resources which has decided to publicise its 2018 Christmas party by hiring a PR agency to puff it. And it’s worth puffing, as the company’s UK and Australia teams re going to be flown to Phuket for an all-expenses paid seven night ‘blow out’. Wow.

Now there’s no way that even the best recruiting Software could help a company make decisions about this kind of activity – but perhaps it would be better if it could. While meeting targets should definitely be rewarded, we’re wondering if recruitment is starting to look like the city traders of 2000 – and we all know how that ended!

There’s another reason that big Christmas and New Year parties aren’t always a great idea in the recruitment sector and that’s because the New Year is when many candidates start to look around. Recruitment database software proves this to be true, and the agency whose online recruitment software isn’t able to capture the details of those who’ve decided that 2019 is the year they change job, is recruitment management software that isn’t paying its way. But it’s not just a software problem – if consultants are still hungover, or sharing memories of their ‘epic’ celebrations, they will definitely miss out on this valuable New Year churn.

New recruitment opportunities…

A Scottish Oil and Gas Survey has discovered that a third of firms in the UK are committed to increasing their workforce in 2019, and that a fifth of firms have already increased their UK-based team by more than 10%. However, this opportunity is also seen as a ‘looming skills shortage’ and SAAS recruitment agencies are able to chart the demand for IT, hydraulic and fluid technology specialists along with the decline in the number of available candidates with those backgrounds – it’s a sellers’ market for sure. The lack of engineers is particularly acute and the best recruitment CRM is now being used to find transferable skills sets to produce candidates who have analogous skills which can be translated into this very turbulent sector.

After two years of no growth in 2015/16 the Scottish oil and gas industry was making a slow recovery in 2017/18 but appears to be sliding downwards again – but because oil and gas values rose by a whopping 18.2% in the last 12 months, the industry is in the strange position of producing less and earning more, and is now facing the need to make recruitment decisions based on uncertainty about Brexit and its role in creating regional fuel security.

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