Reports in national newspapers this week of a rise in targeted recruitment of ex-armed forces personnel should not be over-exaggerated, a recruiter specialising in the market tells Recruiter.

This morning The Daily Telegraph reported that over 600 former gurkhas are being employed by a branch of security and facilities management firm G4S to guard rail facilities. On Monday The Times noted that most of the 520 new engineers telecoms provider BT is set to employ will have an armed forces background.

A spokesperson for Civvyjobs.com, an ex-armed forces online recruiter has told Recruiter that “due to the profile of people in operational military environments there is a lot more public profile of people leaving the military”, but that this extra publicity does not necessarily translate into an increase in demand or supply.

Civvyjobs.com has been running since 2005, with the spokesperson saying its parent company, DEMOBJOB.co.uk, which recruits ex-forces personnel into the engineering and technical sectors, has consistently seen strong interest.

BT has used and will continue to use Career Transition Partnership (CTP) for the recruitment of ex-forces personnel, a company spokesperson tells Recruiter.

A Ministry of Defence spokesperson tells Recruiterthat with CTP “almost entirely funded by the MOD […] 90-odd percent of service leavers use this service”.