Credit crunch dents IT recruitment rates

A new survey of recruitment market activity has revealed that the global economic credit crunch began to affect demand for IT personnel in the UK towards the end of 2007.

The ninth annual salary survey carried out by international recruitment agency, Robert Walters found overall, UK technology recruitment market volumes were slow to pick up at the beginning of last year, but recovered steadily during its second and third quarters.

Salary levels increased the most in the investment banking sector. For example, a chief information officer role or equivalent, could expect to demand up to £150,000 in 2007. This rose to £175,000 by 2008, as measured across the financial services, commerce and industry sectors the agency operates in. At the other end of the scale, a contract junior Java developer in this sector earned up to £450 per day last year, but is expected to take away £480 per day this year.

The survey continued: "The onset of the credit crunch had the impact of reducing activity during the final quarter of the year." In response to the ongoing shortage of IT skilled personnel, the survey observed that companies focused on more innovative ways to attract talent in a "candidate short market," like buy-back schemes.

It found the candidates most in demand were those with software development skills around C++, C# and Java. The highest premiums were paid in the financial services industry, which looked for strong banking product knowledge, fuelled by demand for experience within equity derivatives, fixed income and commodities sectors in particular. And a large number of enterprise-wide projects across this industry also pushed up demand for contractors and fuelled competition for the best talent.

Large numbers of enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects also pushed up demand in the commercial industry sectors for SAP and Oracle trained professionals, on both a permanent and contract basis. And Microsoft .Net development skills remained in high demand as well. But Robert Walters added that a number of companies have undertaken internal training programmes to fill this particular skills gap.

Only public sector IT hiring suffered through 2007, with recruitment activity slowing "dramatically" in line with reduced levels of IT spending after four years of sustained growth. The survey added that this trend would continue to also be impacted by the migration of work to offshore and onshore outsourcers.

"While, on the whole, 2007 was a growth year for technology recruitment, we anticipate a more cautious approach to hiring and a flattening of remuneration levels," it concluded.

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