
Food Manufacturing Recruitment in 2024: Challenges, Insights, and Green Shoots of Hope!
Now that January is out of the way, I thought it would be a good time to share some reflections on 2024. On the surface the recruitment market is all doom and gloom but are there some green shoots appearing…?
Across all sectors in the UK, the ONS reported in October, that the estimated number of vacancies has decreased for the 29th consecutive quarter!
Whilst we await their next quarterly report, later this week, it seems unlikely that the outlook will appear much brighter, with recent budget announcements leading businesses, especially SME’s, to freeze hiring, cancel investment plans and prepare for job cuts to manage increased employment costs.
The NIC increase from 13.8% to 15%, alongside a rise in the national living wage and new employment rights legislation, is likely to exacerbate business hesitancy.
KPMG confirmed the impact this was having on recruitment agencies, they reported the sharpest decline in permanent placements since August 2023.
How has this impacted Food Manufacturing?
Over the past few years, Jarvis Johnson has monitored stats on one of the UK’s biggest Food Manufacturing specific job boards and have noted that in the 2 years since 2022 the number of vacancies advertised has seen a reduction of almost 50%!
Could some of that be due to companies exploring other avenues to identify candidates such as LinkedIn and Indeed? Quite possibly yes, but the general feeling has been that more candidates are “sitting tight” and that companies are exploring alternatives to replace exiting staff.
How have Jarvis Johnson navigated this marketplace?
Interestingly, during 2024 we saw a 60% increase in candidates registering with us compared to 2023, a lot of those were in the final quarter, so it looks like we are gearing up for some major movement in Technical, QA and NPD roles!
Last year saw a lot of changes at some of the bigger food-focused recruitment agencies with leadership re-organisation, agencies splintering into smaller factions and a general decrease in headcount.
Here at Jarvis Johnson we have retained our loyal client base and have added some new clients that we love working with and are delighted to have retained our full team whilst investing in technology to allow us to continue to improve our fill rate.
For vacancies where we are given 4 weeks’ agency exclusivity we are now managing to fill 97% of vacancies with a 5-6 week average time to placement!
If your company has some gaps in Technical, QA or NPD we’d love to talk to you about how we can help. And if you know of people in these disciplines looking for a move, then do get them to register with us.
On a lighter note, you may have seen our Christmas Email where the team enjoyed a ceramics painting session. We’ve now had the “fruits of our labour” back from the kiln!
If you’d like to take a peek and blind vote for the most artistic member of the team for a bit of fun then head over to our LinkedIn Page – we are quite proud of our efforts but think we’ll stick to recruitment as a day job!
We hope 2025 is a memorable one for you for all the right reasons.