This article presents a brief summary of the hard-to-fill positions during October 2017 in the UK. To extract and analyse the data, we have used our big data technology tool Job Market Insights, which provides us with an in-depth picture of the job market trends and the hard-to-fill positions in the jobs market.

About Hard-to-Fill positions. Hard-to-fill positions are vacancies being posted multiple times on paid sites with periods of up to 2 weeks in-between.  These are hot leads, positions that are being paid for by companies and are in desperate need of qualified candidates.

Firstly, we are going to give details of the the hard-to-fill positions from a general point of view at a national level.  We will also show the characteristics of these types of vacancies based on the data from the city or cities that register a representative amount of job offers in each of the regions.

HARD-TO-FILL POSITIONS IN THE UK – GLOBAL VIEW

In October 2017, the total number of hard-to-fill positions (10,884) accounted for 1% of the total vacancies published. In the sections that follow, we are going to provide information from different perspectives, looking at: the most frequently requested job title, salary range, location and issuing company.
If we analyse in terms of the most frequently requested job title, we can see that vacancies from Social Services and Sales sectors come out on top. From a salary perspective, almost 55% of the hard-to-fill positions are in salary ranges of less than £40,000 and around 28% have salaries less than £20,000.  Generally speaking, these are vacancies that are demanding customer service jobs with low salaries.
London is the location with the significant majority of hard-to-fill positions, accounting for 21% in total. We can see that the company ranking is dominated by large companies and organisations from the commodities and Health sectors.

UK – Oct’17 Hard -to -Fill positions by Job Title

UK – Oct’17 Hard -to -Fill positions by Salary

UK – Oct’17 Hard -to -Fill positions by Location

UK – Oct’17 Hard -to -Fill positions by Company

HARD-TO-FILL POSITIONS BY LOCATION

ENGLAND

England maintains the total of 1% of hard-to-fill positions as a proportion of the total number of job offers in the market. The proportion of vacancies by location is similar both in terms of the global distribution of job offers and the distribution of hard-to-fill positions. The main yet subtle difference is in Birmingham, which is the third-placed city in England in terms of its total number of job offers published, but at the bottom of the top 5 in terms of its hard-to-fill positions.

England Oct ’17 – Distribution of Hard-to-Fill positions by Location

England Oct ’17 – Distribution of total job offers by Location

London – Hard-to-Fill Positions in October’17

Around 24% of England’s hard-to-fill positions are concentrated in London. This percentage is significantly higher than that of the other cities that have published large numbers of job offers.  Manchester, Bristol, Leeds and Birmingham account for only 9% of England’s total number of hard-to-fill positions.

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