The customer services sector is hugely exposed to the fortunes of other sectors, but while some call centre areas flounder, others are flourishing in this recession and in a sector where attrition is traditionally high, talent is still hard to come by.

“Call centre recruitment is down but it is not dead in the way other industries have been. Legal recruitment has been hit much more than call centre recruitment. Call centre recruitment has probably not been hit as badly as other industries,” according to Adam Gordon, director at multi-sector recruiter Rise Group.

“There are a lot more people moving into recovery type roles, debt collection roles and much more smaller emphasis on outbound sales,” Gordon adds.

But Francesca Randle, director at call centre recruitment specialist Cactus Search, told Recruiter that finding really good outbound team managers is almost an impossibility.

“Those type of skills, you have got to be credit worthy and you have got to have financial services and that takes a lot of people out of the market place. It is very location specific. That same job in Plymouth will be tough to find. Certain skills are still in massive shortage.”

And the situation has not been helped by the lack of any professional qualifications related to call centres, Randle told Recruiter. “We have no qualifications in contact centres, it is not like with an accountant where they have to have qualifications and you can make sure that box is ticked. In the UK contact centre market, that does not apply.”

While outbound managers are in demand, the same cannot be said about in bound customer services managers as the recession takes it toll, Randle says but this is a sector that pre-recession suffered from high attrition rates and over capacity.

“These businesses have not had to look at detail at their costs. Most of them had been running at an attrition rate that was so astronomically high that they could not sustain it. That is why the redundancies have not been that big because they have just stood still for a bit.”

Gordon says that the outsourcing of jobs to places such as Bangalore, the IT hub of India has slowed. “The public have become disillusioned with the variants in service afforded by that kind of initiative.”

But while some firms are resisting cutting costs through outplacement, others are seeking to save money by recruiting directly leading to a bloodbath on fees, according to Charles Johnson, managing director at Call Centre Managers.

“Since May/June, some organisations have kick started the recruitment for non-essential roles, but cost cutting has meant many are adopting a direct approach initially, consultancies later.

“This has led some consultancies to agree kamikaze fee structures, reduce candidate contact and ultimately damage their reputations that will be difficult to rebuild once the market fully recovers.

Ultimately, the sector’s fortunes are inextricably linked to whichever sector a call centre operates in, says Randle.

“It is totally related to what that centre is doing as to how buoyant it is, what the recruitment market is like within that sector.”

But there is always be a requirement for call centres regardless of economic fortunes because organisations still need to communicate, retain and sell to their customers, according to Johnson.

And there are signs of green shoots, according to John Salt, website director at totaljobs.com: “With job vacancies posted levelling out at approximately 5,200 per month in Q2, this coupled with a slight increase in the number of recruiters advertising roles in the customer services sector has boosted applicant confidence levels, with a record number of job searches and applications to these roles in June 2009.”