Written by Toby Thwaites, Director, Purple Consultancy - Specialists in creative recruitment
Toby Thwaites and Paul Wood founded Purple in June 2000. Purple provides recruitment consultancy to advertising, design, integrated marketing, publishing, digital and agency office support services.
With 30 staff in London and Leeds, and with the highest paying referral scheme in the UK, they're definitely worth talking to. Through innovation and focus on client service, Purple achieves high client satisfaction levels which set it apart from its competitors.
There are many different ways of measuring the state of the economy and the rate at which it is improving. If recent reports from the Bank of England are to be believed then we should all feel that we are a million miles from anything resembling a steady pace of recovery but I'm happy to say that in the creative industries we seem to be bucking the trend.
We have noticed a number of significant indicators to suggest that confidence is growing, not least because the permanent recruitment market, which suffered the most earlier this year, is back with a vengeance. The freelance market has continued to show steady growth but it is the change in the permanent market which we are taking heart from. We were finding, up until the past three months, that clients were taking far longer than normal to make decisions but things are moving along much more quickly now.
Also, in our experience there is now competition between employers for the best candidates on the market and we haven't seen that for a while. We recently appointed a Project Manager who was in the fortunate position of being able to choose which job to accept from three different offers made to her.
Talented individuals are in demand again across the board and the best developers, project managers and designers are enjoying higher levels of interest from clients. Those people who have been hanging on to the security of their existing jobs are seeing this as a good time to begin browsing the market again.
Although no-one can say for certain that the recession is over, all the companies that we deal with (in the advertising, design and marketing sectors) are still cautious but definitely more optimistic. We're aware of design agencies which belong to the bigger networks, now being allowed sign off to spend money on recruitment in 2010.
While the North of England has seen a slower rate of recovery than other parts of the country, our Leeds office is also now enjoying more movement.
All of the above are reasons why we believe that 2010 is going to be a better year for candidates, agencies and hopefully for us too. There is a light at the end of the tunnel.
