Nicola Grimshaw, Digby Morgan’s director responsible for leading the commerce division, gives Human Resourcefulness an update on the state of the market in her sector.

Overall, the last few months have been extremely buoyant and we fully expect that the market will continue to be strong in 2008. There are several key areas of demand. For instance, European HR Managers with good experience across CEE and/or Western Europe. In fact, individuals with the depth and breadth of European ER knowledge that clients are seeking are without doubt in short supply. Additionally, as a result of the significant amount of the business transformation, merger and acquisition activity that we’ve seen recently, there has also been an increase in demand from some of the larger organisations for business partners.

We’re also seeing a surge in demand across the board for functional specialists with good experience. For example, senior talent management and organisational development professionals are in demand in ‘green-field’ businesses to introduce those organisations to new and enhanced talent management methodologies. And, at the mid management level, we’re witnessing a pretty significant requirement for focussed roles such as coaching or sales training managers.

As you’ll have read elsewhere, our international business continues to flourish on the back of significant demand – in particular from the Middle East, Europe and Asia Pacific. Many of these exciting new international opportunities emanate from our large international clients seeking candidates to relocate and introduce best practice HR. In the Asia Pacific region, for instance, there is a real demand for recruitment specialists to join organisations in Hong Kong and Singapore to work on meeting the burgeoning recruitment requirements of the fast growing organisations in the region.

Not one to be left behind, the consulting world is also booming with many headcount quotients already confirmed for the year ahead. This is being driven in no small way by the number of consultants - for career progression reasons – looking to move out of consulting and into the right in-house role rather than to stay within fee earning consulting. Both large and niche consulting firms operating in the human capital consultation space - whether that be the HR transformation, leadership development or business psychology arenas – are searching for specialist HR consultants at all levels.

In this increasingly tough market, the demand for traditional, offline advertising, alongside the retained database search, has increased significantly over the last few months. Clients today are all too aware of the necessity to truly promote their own, particular openings to candidates who are often juggling with several career opportunities.

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