The slowdown in growth of recruitment activity continued in September, according to the latest Report on Jobs from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation and KPMG.
The report for September shows permanent staff placements rose at their weakest rate for a year. In addition, temporary billings growth was at an eleven-month low.
Permanent staff salary growth dipped to a 10-month low. Temp pay decreased slightly for the first time in nine months.
Bernard Brown, partner and head of business services at KPMG, said, "September has seen a further slowdown of the UK jobs market with permanent job appointments rising at their weakest rate for a year. As in previous months engineering, construction and executive staff have been most in demand, an indication of the continuing recovery in the private and manufacturing sector."
He added, "This is in sharp contrast to the situation in the public sector, where many organisations have started redundancy programmes or have at least imposed hiring freezes."
For IT, demand for permanent staff in September was ahead of the traditionally quite August ,and ahead of demand for the same period in 2009. For temporary and contract IT staff, September demand was ahead marginally ahead of that in August, but was down on September 2009.
The permanent IT jobs still in demand by employers were enterprise software sales, IT security sales, cloud computing sales, net developers, and business analysts. On the temporary side it was net developers and business analysts.
In August, there was a surprise plunge in the number of jobs available for IT contractors in the financial services industry.
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