Job vacancies in London dropped by 23% during the week ending 10 May.
On 10 May UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the start of lockdown ‘exit strategy’, with those in England now permitted to exercise multiple times a day and some employees allowed to return to work.
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Despite this, job vacancy levels have fallen in the UK by 9%, with London hit the hardest, suggesting that recruiters are exercising caution.
This is according to real-time statistics from Broadbean Technology, a recruitment software company.
IT withstands London job vacancies slump
However, Broadbean Technology noted resilience in the ICT sector. The data showed that the industry saw a 48% increase in job postings, with specialist roles in ICT making up 18% of all new job vacancies in London.
The recent surge in remote working, which brings with it new ICT challenges, could be the reason behind this increase.
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By GlobalDataHowever, according to research by Talent.io, tech recruitment for permanent roles fell by 57% in London during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Broadbean Technology also noted that demand for freelance staff was up 43% week-on-week. This could be due to an increases in demand for IT support, without hiring permanent staff.
“We saw a lot of speculation in the lead up to the Prime Minister’s announcement of how the UK will come out of lockdown measures which no doubt added to the drop in vacancies across London and the rest of the country,” said Alex Fourlis, managing director at Broadbean Technology.
“While the nation takes a ‘wait and see’ approach with some returning to work in the hopes of bolstering the economy, businesses that perhaps hadn’t completely moved to the Cloud during the first stage of lockdown are now certainly taking the steps they need to, adding to the growing demand for ICT professionals. And we expect this will only continue to increase over the coming days and weeks as more organisations adapt places of work to meet social distancing rules.
“As we get through the first few days of ‘return to work’ for some, we predict there will be an uptick in hiring across some crucial industries over the next week and will be closely monitoring vacancy levels.”
Read more: Investment in UK startups hit £663m in first month of lockdown, led by tech sector.
