Hi, Darren. Thanks for sharing your insights into the Brexit effect on recruitment. Can you tell us, how has Brexit impacted Hudson RPO and our clients in recent months?

From a UK perspective the reality of what we’ve seen with Brexit isn’t actually that dramatic at the moment.

You’d expect to see companies not hiring as many people. With such big turmoil and such big change, you’d expect that it would affect UK hiring numbers. That certainly isn’t the case for us at all.

Generally speaking, our hires under management have been quite resilient. If you look at pure recruitment agencies, and look at the data point of their financial performance, you’ll see that the market is relatively flat year on year. Recruitment outsourcers are the only providers to experience double-digit growth. This mirrors sector growth.

It’s not drastic. The market’s not a bad market to be in at the moment. That would all suggest that businesses are resilient in the face of uncertainty.

Are there any exceptions to that, such as blue collar hiring?

The only caveat to that is in specialist hiring. As an example, car makers in the UK have been creating noise regarding relocating and a reduction in jobs. I don’t know whether this links to the Brexit issue, or whether it relates more to a slow demand in diesel cars plus losing market share to new providers of electric cars.

But, generally speaking, other hires within blue collar aren’t drastically down, either. This suggests that the hiring market is resilient now amidst the political drama.