A Year of Change in MR Recruitment

September's relaunch issue of our MRWho supplement will be looking at changes in the UK MR jobs market, and in salary levels, in the last 12 months. This excerpt looks at the jobs market and the growth of new functions such as Panel Managers, Account Managers and pure 'Bus Dev' roles; next week, we'll examine salary levels.

It's been a buoyant 12 months. Mean salaries for some levels are up significantly, overall recruitment levels are up, and new types of researcher are coming to the fore with a mix of skills rarely seen in the past. About the only thing that's not changing is the going rate for an SRE - but then we don't expect miracles.

Junior-to-mid-Level Agency Side

The number of ads classified as SRE level (typically 2-4 years' experience) has almost doubled in 18 months (see table below), and has grown steadily almost every 6 months since we started counting in 2000. Good SREs are more than ever in demand, and as difficult as ever to find.

There has also been an especially strong growth in recruitment of JREs / entry level researchers (6 -12 months' MR experience) over the past year, with a contrasting dip at the end of 2004 and a surge forward in 2005 - for fairly obvious reasons, entry level / graduate positions are more seasonal than others.

Agency ADs and Directors

Away from the mid-level or 'engine-room' agency side positions the picture is complex, as it has been since mid-2001. High level roles (senior Directors and above) were quiet in the first four months of this year - as quiet as at any time since 9/11 - but are now on the rise again. In their place, there were an unusual number of roles for 'Directors' pitched between £40k and £52k in the first half of 2005 - the lower end of this is below the current mean salary for an AD which has rocketed to its current level of c.£45,000.

Client Side

Numbers of client-side jobs have recovered in the last few months but overall they have only inched up in the past 12. This is perhaps the area where there is least shortage of reasonable candidates - client-side roles are the most in demand among job seekers. But reasonable does not mean good: recruiters on the client side, too, have struggled to find high-calibre mid-level candidates.

We are also seeing more senior level client-side roles, although not at the highest level - jobs paying £70k plus are always scarce on the client side, but there have been more in the £50-60k range this year.

Bus Dev

Most recruiters agree that business development (BD) has been one of the big focal points of recent recruitment - we have recently added a 'Sales / Business Development' category to our search in recognition of its rapid rise.

In the US, business development skills are far more standard for senior researchers, but, until recently, the UK has apparently kept many of its ADs and Directors below the parapet and let them 'get on with the research'. Such roles are scarcer than they were two years ago, and landing a top job in MR is increasingly likely to depend on having skills beyond research itself.

New roles

The biggest change we have noticed in the last year is the boom in new roles - they are definitely research industry, but many involve less actual research in the traditional sense. We commented last year on the rise of the field/project management crossover role, and there is more about this in our interview with operations recruitment specialist Gina Moore in the September MRWho. In addition, we now have many roles for online research project managers, panel managers, and account managers - these tend to have more emphasis on interpreting client requirements, reporting and arranging research, and less on the nitty gritty of running projects, from questionnaire design to writing code frames.

A huge rise in the number of analyst positions reflects both a change in the market and a broadening of our own base. We added an 'Analyst' category just over a year ago, spanning several levels of seniority and used for roles with a focus on back-end analysis, interpretation of results and secondary research as opposed to primary survey research.

We also seem to have a lot of openings for statisticians at the moment. Methodologists and marketing scientists can be a supplement to the less technical account manager types mentioned above, or can bunch together in agencies priding themselves on their advanced methods and models - a few such agencies are emerging or growing now.

It would be wrong, however, to suggest that traditional researchers are an endangered species - especially given the overall rise in ads of all kinds. They may constitute a smaller percentage of our ads but their absolute numbers are up. There is more in the MRWho about what's happening to the more mainstream researchers, in terms of demand for skills and the adaptation of their roles.

UK ad no.s on MrWeb
Job Function	1st half 2004:	2nd half ‘04:	1st half ‘05:
Entry Level RE:	129	90	183
RE:	395	421	516
SRE:	520	605	803
Project Manager:	369	389	474
Research Manager:	184	195	186
AD:	293	331	345
Director:	197	242	232
Other:	-	206	176
Analyst:	-	181	278
Field (all levels):	183	154	156
DP (all levels):	118	102	134

To register for free copies of MRWho as they are published (pdf format emailed to subscribers once every 1-2 months) please email mrwho@mrweb.com with the title 'subscribe MRWho' and stating your name, job title and company in the body of the message, plus the email address you want them sent to if it's not that from which the email comes.

Nick Thomas

Next week in DRNO: UK research salaries

In late 2000 when we started monitoring job numbers and salaries, the gap between the mean salary for an SRE (mostly 2 to 4.5 years) and an AD (6-7 years plus) was £9,500. Today the gap is £15,500.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

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