Jobs Feature: UK MR's Recruitment Rollercoaster
February 12 2013
Market research was once said to be 'recession-proof', but we don't hear that quite so often these days. Are we in a 'double-dip'? And in our new, more cautious mode, who are we recruiting and how many of them? Today we continue our features to celebrate our 100,000th job ad this week with a look at the stats for 2005-12.
A game of two halves
This 8-year period divides fairly neatly in two. There's no denying 2009 was a very difficult year: researchers stayed largely positive through spring and summer of 2008 while the first signs of the financial crisis plunged other sectors into gloom, but by the autumn most in the industry were beginning to fear the worst and those with the budgets were looking around for cuts and freezes. Cue a rapid drop in the number of vacancies advertised by the start of 2009. That's obviously going to be the main feature of the period, but beyond this there are some interesting trends and differences.
A quick word of caution. We don't of course post absolutely every position in UK research on the site, and client decisions to reduce advertising in these tough times have had a slight effect on the numbers. We had pretty much all the ads in 2006 and we've got the great majority of them now, but we estimate this factor has reduced totals in 2007-10 by about 6% and 2011-12 by about 8%, compared with 2005-6 levels.
Adjusting for this, we'd estimate that overall UK market research recruitment declined in 2009 to about 65% of its previous level, recovered to about 80% in 2010-11, and has dipped again to about 75% in 2012.
Is that bad? Well no actually, compared to some other sectors it's not, and in many cases it doesn't mean companies have shrunk or redundancies have been widespread, just that HR departments are cautious and potential candidates staying put / having to stay put.
Who's being recruited?
What's more interesting, perhaps, is to look at how activity has changed by level of seniority.
| No.s of UK research jobs posted on MrWeb at each level of seniority, 2005-12 |
| |
| | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 |
| | | | | | | | | |
| Entry Level RE: | 392 | 420 | 402 | 299 | 127 | 153 | 139 | 185 |
| RE: | 1180 | 1395 | 1195 | 982 | 546 | 823 | 809 | 743 |
| SRE: | 2014 | 2131 | 1978 | 1812 | 1216 | 1610 | 1515 | 1388 |
| Proj Manager (agency): | 1382 | 1901 | 1813 | 1792 | 1241 | 1594 | 1619 | 1462 |
| Research Manager (client side): | 457 | 550 | 526 | 644 | 344 | 463 | 399 | 327 |
| AD: | 1109 | 1520 | 1684 | 1600 | 1147 | 1410 | 1383 | 1333 |
| Director and above: | 610 | 710 | 848 | 935 | 586 | 730 | 673 | 590 |
| |
|
| | % | % | |
| | 2012 / 2005 | 2012 / peak year | |
| | | | |
| Entry Level RE: | 47 | 44 | |
| RE: | 63 | 53 | |
| SRE: | 69 | 65 | |
| Proj Manager (agency): | 106 | 77 | |
| Research Manager (client side): | 72 | 51 | |
| AD: | 120 | 79 | |
| Director and above: | 97 | 63 | |
A few big trends are readily apparent...
JREs and Trainees
In 2005-7, numbers advertised were at record levels. A lot of grad recruitment occurs, obviously, at the back end of the year and this level lost more than others in 2008, but it really fell off the cliff in 2009 and had recovered very little until 2012 - when perhaps it dawned on some firms that there are no young researchers coming through and we can't forever be too cautious to address this situation.
Research Executives and SREs
There is always demand for good REs and SREs, even in recession, and SRE recruitment in particular has remained solid - it remains one of the most popular roles on the site. However, having led the field by a mile in 2005 it's now advertised about as often as the next two levels up on the agency side - this reflects research companies' desire for employees to contribute to business development, actively manage accounts and run projects from start to finish, at an earlier stage of their career than was the case ten years ago.
Agency side Project Managers and ADs
The two categories where we actually had more ads in 2012 than in 2005. The more competitive, nay cutthroat environment about which we hear so much means agencies are pushing execs with as little as three or four years' experience out into the big wide world to look for business, and take charge of accounts with relatively little supervision. Those with around twice this are generally into AD roles and are being very well paid for their exertions, relative to ten years ago - see comments and stats later this week. Generally, if we contrast RE and SRE recruitment levels with the fortunes of these two, ought we to worry about the quality of the research produced? More business-getters and managers and fewer sweating over those piles of tables making sure everything's in order... This will be controversial and I'm not sure what I think, except that it's worth considering.
Director level and above
Something interesting occurred here as the recession hit: recruitment of senior directors actually climbed rapidly in the last months of 2008 - it's the only agency side category that peaked in this pivotal year rather than earlier. Agencies tried to beef up their senior teams to prepare for tough times ahead - ad wordings placed a particularly strong emphasis on sales at the time. Maybe they found all they needed, or maybe the next year they realised they couldn't afford it and there wasn't enough biz to be dev'd to justify it - in any case they appear to have gone back to recruiting go-getter AD types. On the whole, if you take out the two years 2007-8, recruitment of directors and above has been relatively stable.
Client side - RM level
Recruitment for the client side boomed between 2005 and 2008, crashed in 2009 and has since returned to 2009 levels after a mini-revival. Factors in this are more people staying put; less willingness to commit to the overhead (research resources are bought in - good for the agencies of course); and the fact that some sectors of industry have been having a tougher time than research, with resulting blanket bans on recruitment affecting research departments. Pharmaceuticals, new media and retail continue to pull in researchers and analysts; finance and the public sector, among others, are not generally much in the market.
Some conclusions
What would I pick out of all this as my executive summary? Perhaps the following:
1. We got burnt, and have adjusted our self-assessment from 'recession-proof' to perhaps 'recession-resistant'
2. Big agencies while doing fairly well in the turnover and profit stakes are cautious about headcount expansion given the Euro crisis, fiscal cliff and other uncertainties. On the whole, however, they are not cutting numbers either.
3. the knee-jerk reaction in 2008-9 was to slash graduate recruitment and (initially) look for senior people, and this has not proved, or will not prove, a particularly good strategy in the long-term.
4. whereas a 25% drop in employment or turnover would of course represent a disaster, a 25% drop in recruitment is something we should be able to live with. The job market, for researchers with good experience and reasonable expectations, remains excellent here in the UK.
5. any number of small and medium-sized firms have continued to flourish and the expansion and bullishness of BrainJuicer, YouGov, Nunwood, Kadence, Firefish, Truth and many others - notwithstanding current or recent blips for a couple of these - is a sign of a very healthy spirit of innovation and enterprise in UK research, likely to go on creating jobs into the future. And I'm not really touching on new areas opening up to us, such as analysis of big data, biometrics or the use of online communities and custom panels. These we'll look at later in the week.
All that said, we do need more of a strategy to get young people into the profession, after a period of neglect (and not so they can teach us about social media, by the way, but so that we can teach them about research - more of that later too). Some agencies have good initiatives going, and we'll do our best to promote their best practice and encourage their efforts in DRNO and elsewhere on MrWeb. Keep watching this space.
Tomorrow, stepping back from the stats and going all quallie, I'll look at skills requirements, how they're changing and how they're not.
Nick Thomas
All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.
