Brexit: PageGroup Cuts Staff

High employment, despite the disarray of Brexit, has finally started to bite the recruitment sector. Job creation is starting to slow, and even though Brexit is now a legal certainty, many employers are holding off on making any further hiring commitments.Global recruiters PageGroup have been hit with an almost 5% loss in UK profits as a result. The global recruitment firm said that it has been forced to cut back on over 50 staff due to this poor performance. Michael Page stated the downturn occurred due to a lack of candidates for senior roles. Many skilled or managerial level individuals are staying put, rather than risk a job move in the current climate.

It wasn’t all bad news for PageGroup however. Their 2019 full-year profits were, in total, up by 5%. The UK, rather tellingly, was the only market that saw profits slump. CEO Steve Ingham wasn’t concerned overall either, hailing PageGroup’s flexible business model as one that “..enables us to react quickly to changes in market conditions.”

The rising spectre to the recruitment sector, however, is the increasingly visible trend of a vacancy market in stagnation. According to research from the REC and KPMG, new opportunities are static, and even the previously booming demand for temp workers is slowly fizzling out.

Even the new certainty around Brexit has turned out to be somewhat hollow.  The chances of tariff and trade agreements extremely unlikely in the timeframe set out by the UK government, according to the EU’s chief negotiators. In reality, both employers and candidates are not really any better off now than last year, in terms of knowing what the actual impacts will be, and when they might hit.

As it stands, the Brexit bite is still getting larger.