Tue, 8 May 2012

Business confidence has risen across medium and large UK organisations, with the number of companies with sales freezes in place dropping for the first time in a year.

This is according to the ‘Tracking UK Recruitment’ report by professional recruiter Barclay Meade, which sees recruitment freezes in place at 13% of medium and large firms across business services, supply chain, manufacturing and financial services. It had been 16% in Q4 2011.

Increased business confidence also resulted in the number of companies hiring sales staff more than doubling, at 34% from 15% at the end of last year.

Encouragingly, almost two thirds (65%) of firms said that this was to support business growth plans, alongside which the number of firms with a recruitment freeze fell for the first time in four quarters, down from 16% to 13%.

Nationwide, 78% of business plan to bring in new staff in Q2 2012, and 57% of business owners said that Q1 hiring activity was at similar level to before the financial crisis began in September 2007, up from 54% in Q4 2011.