The trend among software companies to transfer low-level jobs to India and the Far East means UK recruiters will be left fighting over a shrinking market for senior creative IT people.

That’s the claim of James Yeagle (pictured), sales director of Anglo-American IT software recruiter Anteo Group.

“In the software world, 25% of the work will be outsourced to places like India and Vietnam,” he said. “Of the remaining 75%, the majority will be extremely high-end. The recruitment industry in this country will have to move up the food chain.”

Skilled professionals in demand in the UK will include senior software architects and designers, with lower-end coding jobs outsourced abroad.

UK recruiters will have to up their game further as companies in the Far East adopt industry-standard benchmarking processes to improve software development.

These improvements mean software companies abroad will take an increased share of the work, leaving the remains to UK recruiters.

But Yeagle adds that the UK, where nimble small and medium-sized companies dominate the IT software recruitment market, will adapt faster than the US.

The IT recruitment market in the US has a preponderance of large multi-million dollar firms, which are not as swift to adapt to changing market conditions,

says Yeagle.

“[In the US] a lot of companies still do a lot of low-end stuff – unfortunately I don’t see them going forward,” he added.

But Richard Wilson, sales director at IT recruiter Penta Consulting, disagrees.

“Telephone support works well when it is outsourced, but other low-level things like testing don’t work so well,” he said.

“There are issues because you end up spending more time on tasks because you lose control of what you are doing.”

James Yeagle co-founded Anteo in 2002 and has seen it grow into a $12m turnover IT recruitment firm.