As a Peterborough United season ticket holder I can certainly say 2009 was a year of two halves! As we all know the first half was a tough period for many businesses and recruitment and training was no exception. The daily news bulletins saw a seemingly endless stream of horror stories coming out one after another. Indeed the news reporters seemed to be gleefully competing to see who could bring us the worst news story the biggest financial disaster or the highest number of job losses in a day.
So it wasn't surprising then that many of our clients decided to 'review' their recruitment and training needs and, as one of my old bosses used to say, decided to 'sweat their existing assets' as much as possible. Quality people became even harder to find as fear and uncertainty created an increasing degree of inertia among candidates. The general atmosphere of economic doom and gloom and pessimism over the future seemed to turn previously great sounding career opportunities into reckless and irresponsible leaps into the unknown. However, it wasn't all bad Peterborough United got promoted!
As we got to the second half of the year it seems that some sense of perspective returned. Sure it was tough but that short burst of sunshine after Easter seemed to be the catalyst that saw confidence and a degree of enthusiasm start to return to our markets. It's still a bit of a hard grind at times, but we do seem at last to be seeing clients start to realise that they can't put off making recruitment decisions for ever and there's only so much sweat those assets can give!
Locating good quality people at the right time and in the right place is always a challenge and it is still the case that many of the best candidates are keeping their heads down. However, I'm pleased to say that for the past few months we've been pretty much as busy as at any other time in our history.
Will this trend continue this year? As you will have gathered from my monthly columns during 2009 I am a natural optimist so I'm going to say yes. And what's more, at a recent industry conference I attended, the HSBC's senior economist, Mark Berrisford-Smith, told us all the recession was over so it must be true.
Last year is a reminder for many of us that for all the good times we have encountered there will always be some not-so-good times to balance things out. What matters really is that you focus on what you can control and try to keep a sense of perspective on all the things that you can't that's just what I and every other Peterborough United fan will be trying to do in 2010!
Guy Moreton is director of recruitment practitioner MorePeople.
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