Recruitment and HR firms could be set to benefit from the swathe of job cuts announced at the BBC in December as the corporation looks to outsource its HR requirements.

New BBC director-general Mark Thompson announced almost 3,000 job losses last month in a bid to save around £320m over a period of three years. According to a report in the Evening Standard, many of the first wave of job cuts will come from BBC People, the BBC’s HR arm. Around half of the 1,100 posts at BBC People would be axed, and 350 of these would be outsourced, said the report.

Dr Lesley Garrick, a senior consultant with HR company the Hay Group, added that there was an increasing trend towards outsourcing certain HR functions, although few companies had done it on such a large scale.