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.

Green shoots, a new dawn, the upturn? As a team we have been whispering these phrases a lot over the last couple of months but we still daren’t say that we are definitely moving out of the deep downturn which has becalmed all of us.

Nevertheless, we have noticed some emerging trends which have led to a demand in the market for senior HR professionals. In particular, there have been a number of new, senior roles created in the leadership development and talent management space. We feel that this clearly indicates that a strong people focus and the importance of managing and retaining key talent is continuing to rise up the overall business agenda.

The interest in the shared services concept continues to grow and, over the last three months, we have seen several organisations coming to us to hire managers from and to existing shared service centres. Additionally, we are seeing an increasing number of enquiries as to the state of market for accomplished shared service centre managers as businesses contemplate bringing more centres back to the UK or, indeed, start to implement them in the UK as a means of introducing still more efficiencies into the HR function.

We’re delighted to report that we’ve been asked to become involved in some new preferred supplier arrangements that are, in turn, leading us to develop genuinely strong partnerships between ourselves and our clients. As a result, our candidates are enjoying the myriad benefits of Digby Morgan working as a fully integrated arm of the recruitment function of those preferred clients. This has meant that our in-depth knowledge of the client’s business is being developed to a very high level so that we are seen as a true ambassador of their business.


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