Neil Carberry:

“The near-term challenges are reasonably clear. We have ill judged government regulation. Trade unions whose views of the workplace are embedded in the past. Both parties failing to see that the wishes of a million temporary and contract workers and the wider workforce are different than they were 20-30, actually even five years ago. So, let's be clear, temporary and contract work keeps this country going at times like these, and you as REC members are the heart of that. Any government that restricts it is playing with fire.” 

"My message to you as our members today is that I am now seeing a wider spread of outcomes amongst our members than at any time since the pandemic. There is now growth out there for businesses who get it right. And we really look forward to celebrating the best of your successes with you through the year. So here are four things that I think are incredibly important... 

1. Temporary contract work is essential to our growth at all skill levels. It's about delivering the big stuff in the industrial strategy just as much as it is temporary supply in Logistics  

2. Permanent hiring also needs to change because operating models are changing. We'll talk about that in some of the panels later. Different forms of development, AI, other megatrends and really strategic talent thought from the C-Suite of British business is more important than ever. 

3. A more long term approach is going to be necessary from all of us. And I think that the challenging thing here at a time when many businesses are sitting on their hands in the client base, is we're going to have to set out on some journeys that we don't know what the destination is, but actually the destination is better, whatever it is, than not doing anything now and getting caught up and replaced. 

4. professional firms bound by clear standards are going to be essential partners in this world.”

“If you have the view that technology can do everything, what you do then is start to reframe the conversation of where does human interaction add value to the process that you're working in? And I think that's an advanced way of thinking about transformation in the day and age we are. Because if you flip it the other way and say, I'm going to do work the way I've always done it, and where can technology add in? You're just adding a tool in conversation and you'll just end up with plugging tools in. And what happens is there's a new tool every four weeks. And there's also a lot of tools out there that are not AI, that are not safe.”  

“And, and I think the productivity conversation is difficult because unless you are instructive as a leader and a business owner as to what you do with those [extra] five hours a week [enabled by new AI technology], you end up sitting in a very inefficient transformation place.” 

“I'm sort of seeing this strange market where clients think it's a client driven market and they're being super selective. They're not in maybe a hiring freeze, but they're not in a volume attrition hiring based landscape. They're in a selective hiring process. So, they still feel they can hire the perfect candidate that looks like them, sounds like them, have the same CV as them, and they're taking longer candidates. And I'll talk about job hugging in a minute. Candidates still feel that since the pandemic, they've had the right to decide how they do work. Things like balance are now in the equation. Now, you might say that's flexibility. Flexibility is not balance. Flexibility is something we expect from our contractual structure. Balance is the infusion of purpose and what we want out of our career and whether we like it or not. When we're in the pandemic, we tested balance.”

David Smith: 

"As you will know, there are two broad sets of figures we get on what's happening in the labour market from the official statisticians. The first one on which the unemployment rate, the employment rate and most other things are based on a labour force survey. The Labour force survey is a survey of in good times around about 60,000 people. That's what all those statistics are based on. But it's been having difficulty over sample sizes recently. So, the sample sizes have been, have fallen very sharply. They're now recovering but you know, there has been a health warning attached to the labour force survey statistics for some time now. They've not been as reliable as they should be again and again the ONS introduced this HMRC payroll data series, which is, as its name suggests, is from I imagine revenue customs figures for payrolls. And, unfortunately, that is very unreliable as well because you know, it moves around all over the place. The initial readings which generate all the headlines and suggest to you quite often that the labour market is falling off a cliff are often revised and revised very substantially. So, we're in the middle of a bit of a statistical black hole at the moment in terms of the labour force surveys being improved. And it's getting better. The payroll numbers are often wildly out on first reading. So the REC report on jobs, is as I say, a very useful corrective."

Yael Selfin: 

"I think there's two things we need to bear in mind. There's always two halves for an economist. The first one is that we have been through for some time a period of lower growth and that's more structural. And that's driven by two things. One, it's either driven by slower productivity, which is really the holy grail for us. We want stronger productivity or because we have fewer people entering the labour force, some of the strengths in the growth numbers over the the last decade, if you like, were more on the labour part rather than the productivity, with kind of suffering from bigger productivity for some time. 

So there's a number of trends there. Generally, I'd say given the fundamentals, we're not doing that badly actually. You wouldn't potentially expect in real terms by more than say 1.3, it's probably lower than what OBR are saying given where we are, what the input is. What we need is stronger productivity, and we will talk a lot about how we can get to the stronger role to play in that because the labour market is very important. It's not just technology, it's how we get the people with the technologies that matters."

Tom Way 

"I think going back to the conversation, what we're hearing about our clients, I think we are at a stage where maybe we become overwhelmed by these big complex terms that are being used in the market at the moment. So what does contingent workforce management mean? What does workforce solution mean? What do these big phrases actually mean to organisations? And I think we're certainly taking the time to invest in getting a lot closer to our customers to see actually what these terms mean. What does transformation mean to a global bank versus a small manufacturing company in Grimsby, right? And how is that going to affect their sort of hiring? And I think we need to be ...I'm going to try and be slightly optimistic today; I think we need to look at the areas that you'll be talking about around sectors and industry where there is growth, because in the UK there are some real success stories. But, I think the biggest challenge for us and our customers is to ensure we’re pointing our strategy in the direction of where, because certainly where I speak to companies that are not where they wish, it's because they're afraid to pivot and they're afraid to be agile. And I think going back to your question, a lot of the clients that we're speaking to now on Adam's slide, skills are one thing. If you can't deal with ambiguity and if you can't be agile and if you can't pivot at the end of the quarter because we're going to change, then maybe you're not the right candidate for us. And I think that strengthens the need for the humans in the loop like we've talked about today even more than maybe it did in the pre AI era.

Hana Searson:  

"There are sort of three huge disruptions happening to us all at the same time. Obviously, AI and technology, demographic change in the workplace, and then the geopolitical and the economic instability that we've talked about that, you know, it's hard to avoid. So, what that means for us is that when I'm thinking about the future of BT, I can't plan for a future. I have to plan for multiple plausible features and kind of put some hopefully calculated bets on one or two of them. And there's a real paradox in that because when things are uncertain around us, which is what we're feeling at the moment, our natural reaction is to be more cautious, which we heard from Adam's talk; but the situation demands the opposite. We've got to get brave; we've got to experiment; we've got to test out where we need skills and talent in the future. And so, uncertainty is making organisations more cautious at precisely the time that they should be more adaptive. And I think that's one of our key tensions."

Matthew Wragg: 

"So I actually think it's the drivers from the customer point of view. And, the drivers from the candidate point of view are hopefully steering us back into that far more consultative people orientated, “We know” not “we've found”, and that's going to be a real shift for a lot of businesses and a real shift to a lot of customers because however much you say you want advice; lots of customers just want a commodity. And actually, how do you scale partnership? How do you scale trust? Because lots of individuals or hiring managers or a consultant may trust each other, but how many times have you seen a hiring manager move and suddenly that consultant who knows that business so well, who's been an absolute competitive advantage for that team and that hiring manager, now doesn't have a relationship there and has to go and find another one elsewhere, and that takes time. 

So, I hope it's going to really challenge us to come back to the professional service that we are as an industry rather than the optics of the transactional “and all you guys do is plug it in and go and play pool or go to the gym, pub”, etcetera. Hopefully actually the optics are much more about actually you guys really do know something or more you're really curious to find the answer. I think we've built an industry which is really good at jumping really high really late. Unfortunately, we now don't know how high the customers want us to jump or when they want us to jump. So how do we cope with that?"

Donna Parker: 

"I think as an industry where we sometimes go wrong with it is, you know, and I see some of our new entrants coming into the business and thinking, oh, I've had a coffee with the HR director of such and such that that contract's ours. And it's like, no, that's not built over a coffee that's built over, you know, months, weeks, sometimes years of building a relationship and building that trust. And that can be challenging too. 

And certainly, when I see new people coming into the industry, it's about them having the confidence to be really honest with the client and manage their expectation and be able to say, listen, that's not my area of expertise, but I know the market. Let me point you in the direction of somebody that can help you. And whereas people will tend to go, no, we can do it all. Well, actually, we can't do it all. And it's about being that real trusted partner and trusted advisor so that if you're not the right answer, you can point them in the direction of somebody that is, and we'll support them and get them what they need and get their end."

"This idea of a career ladder was never really designed for careers. It was when organisations were first putting in a hierarchy, you know, they've got enough people that they needed organisational charts and structures and systems, but the legacy of the ladder has really stuck around. You will still say much to my stress, people writing about careers or writing books about careers, and this sort of image [pictured] is on the cover of that career.  So, we still have a little bit of work to do to make sure that people feel good about the reality of our careers. Of course, there's no straight line to success. We are unlearning and relearning all of the time and we need people, and you must see this all the time in the work that you do. We need people to create, not wait, when it comes to their careers. One of the problems I hear most commonly from the organisations we work with, which tend to be kind of big client organisations like Lego and Microsoft and Sky, is we need people to own their own career. People's development still feels quite dependent on other people."

"People talk about being adaptable, almost like your learnability feels like a really critical skill. But what learning often still looks like in organisations is based on levels. We really want to help people to learn as you go, not about finding more time, but about learning more from what you already do; the meetings, the moments that already make up your week. Those lobsters shed their shells. How do we learn in hard moments? So not just waiting until after the moment because there is a lot of evidence that we lose a lot of learning. If you wait for the project review, that's three months down the line. But when it's feeling hard, how do we learn in the here and now? How do we look for the learning rather than lose the learning? And just like [Lobsters] fuel their own growth, how can we all lead our own learning?"

"When you do projects and then you wait to reflect, you know, three months down the line and then you stop and you try and remember everything that's happened in the last three months, what memories are inaccurate and patchy and you lose loads of learning. So what a high performing team is very good at is learning fast from mistakes. And they've moved away from what's sometimes called name, blame and shame cultures, which nobody wants to be in because that sort of sounds as hard as it is compared to actually a culture where you're just open about mistakes and it's sort of more together. What can we learn?"

Georgina Huntley: 

"I think, from experience, what I'd be sharing is the pitfalls of thinking about AI incorporating into your organisation as a piece of tech. It's not, it's just change management. So it's to enable the human element. So making sure that we're really considering this the problem that we're looking to solve, putting people at the centre of that in the way that their role changes, the way it impacts what we deliver and value to our clients and not looking at it as a tech implementation."

Alyx Peters: 

It's hard to take some stuff on that journey so we developed digital first, internal digital first training programme and that's something that gets updated every month. I think that's the problem with a lot of the training around AI is some people think, well, we put on one training day, we'll give you an annual update. You need this to be continuous, like a living document. So that, I mean, I'm a little bit nervous about the screening of candidates because of that hidden worker and those, you know, transient skills, different sectors. So if you give it a very fixed formula of what you're looking for, you've missed so many hidden workers within that thing, I think. 

Dries De Coster: 

"I think also it's important to kind of, I guess look at the category of AI and really split it out because most people when we talk about AI, it is the big C you know our new friend Claude. And you know, really mostly people are talking about large language models which can make their own decisions, etcetera. But when it comes to giving your team confidence on some of these processes that we're talking about, automation often will do the trick, right? Where actually it's nondeterministic and therefore you don't get the hallucination risks of what's going rogue. And that really gives teams confidence. So, you know, especially now in the recent weeks, I don't know if people have been following it, but you're seeing more and more noise of Microsoft cancelling their cloud subscription, Uber eating through their whole AI budget for the a year in four months because of this kind of consumption of the tokens. That's just people are eating through really quick quickly. So again, being able to actually use automation where it's appropriate not only stops the kind of, you know, the bots from going rogue, but also means you're not consuming those kind of more expensive tokens. So it's really important to understand what are you trying to achieve and then applying the right kind of level of AI automation into that use case."

"I think culture is very important and I think anyone can copy our MLA products or services of companies. But you can't emulate culture. I do pride myself on our team and making sure that the values we had at the beginning are kept in principle. But as you grow business, you'll understand it does get harder knowing the individuals. Firstly you get a little bit of divorce. Rebel culture is very important. So it was in every acquisition. Due diligence plays a play and it's the usual DD. But actually the DD we do is all about the culture and understanding that. I know it's a fuzzy word and how do you measure it? You can't, but you can get a feel for how closely aligned."

"The word sales hasn't been mentioned yet. Relationship building, that's all about that. If you think about any sports person, they have an agent they're working through. And I think that's how if you're selling a house in America, real estate, you'll have an agent representing you. I think that's how the consultant we mentioned before is consultative, You'll have someone representing you. The best recruiters I ever came across were the ones who used to carry a case or a briefcase full of CVS and knew every single one of them like his mastermind subject matter in a specific chosen disciplines and knew him inside out, knew about the family, knew where the last words, knew about the skills, the quality, where they would go in there, right. What would and could translate that to the customer. So I think that will go back to a little bit of old school sales and relinquish people to do that rather than we're not looking at shaving sales and recruiters. So it's yes, it's impactful and it's faithful, but engaging with the workforce."

James Osborne 

"I think that the AI conversation, I think we just need to take a bit of a step back for a second because it's not just about AI. AI is just one part of this jigsaw that we're in at the moment. I think a lot of organisations are trying to reinvent themselves. They're trying to reimagine what their businesses look like and what it should be. We're saying to a lot of organisations that we work with that in many cases, not every case, but in many cases, the sort of the DNA, the skills, the attributes that got you to today, which made you a brilliant business in the first place, may or may not be the skills and attributes that you need in tomorrow's market. So those recruitment companies that seem to be doing the best at the moment, and this is not directly answering your question, but we'll touch on it, is those companies doing the best at the moment are the ones who are either sticking to what they're really, really damn good at. And what they are really damn good at actually is actually what is really needed in the market today. That's the old school stuff, or they have completely reinvented themselves and look very different, whether it be AI or whatever else it might be." 

Alastair Viner

"I think my advice really would be to anyone, you know, looking in the market or considering taking the leap of new tools is don't start with a demo, but start with the operating model behind it. You know, we almost on James's point, we want to take a step back and we're talking about equipping for success so we need to know very clearly what success means both to you and both to your organisation. If you were to ask that question to everyone in the room, we'll probably get very different answers even within an intercompany level. So you guys want to start there and understand what success looks like, what really we're trying to achieve. And from there I then almost recommend you take an audit of your existing systems. You know, I think whilst there's all these tools out there which seem to promise the world and be that silver bullet that we're all looking for in our business, that only goes as far as we know what is already in place. So look at that, I guess the engine room of your business, look at all those systems from your CRM, your ATS, how your time and bill, your invoicing, you know, look at all those systems, map them all out. Are they connected? Do they talk to each other? Does the information feed each other and give data which we can action clearly and succinctly? I think once you start there, you get a good understanding of well, what those problems we're actually trying to address are. And from that you can then take it into a decision making process." 

Seb Maley

"I think it's probably a long time since data security and cyber risk were seen as IT issues.  I think they're board level commercial risks now. And obviously recruiters have very, very rich data, obviously going to be attractive to cyber criminals, but also kind of vulnerable to accidental misuse as well, particularly as you're adding more AI tooling. So I think it's really, really important that recruitment leaders have a very clear view of what data they have, wherever it is, who has access. And that includes internal access, but also third party tooling as well. And, but also really importantly, what happens in the first 24 hours if something does go wrong, you know. What is the plan there? So there's a huge opportunity at the moment with tech enablement, but I think clear governance is absolutely pivotal and paramount. That means approved tooling, staff training so they can use tools properly, supply due diligence, cyber insurance naturally, and then a really strong incident response plan as well."

David Wreford

"I think the nature of work is sort of not disintegrating, but it's becoming much more fragmented, where organisations are talking less about jobs and more about skills. And therefore there is a much more fluid way of thinking about what we want people to do in the future. And the strategic workforce plan is the fundamental way of doing it. It's typically these days identifying the skills you have today, who's got those skills, the extent to which you match your own current skill requirements. And then what is it about the future of work that means that you're going to need a different skill set? And then it's everything you do with it thereafter. And it's really important, I think for you if you're not involved in those plans but may be able to facilitate the way they evolve those plans, because it tells you the skills that they're going to grow or it tells you the skills that they need to buy or the skills that they need to borrow or the skills that they need to bounce or the skills that they need to bounce or the skills that they need to bot. So you've got all these nice B words. It just used to be a buy and build world when I grew up, but now it's all sorts of different ways of thinking about what future talent looks like and how you get there. So I kind of think if you want to be that strategic advisor or if you want to be the trusted consultant, then getting underneath the skin of these plans, I think is your way of, of getting intimate with your clients. But also enabling you through that intimacy to craft and build stronger relationships with those organisations to ensure you're able to equip them with the skills that they need in the future. And of course, there is a lot that shifts it to a build time model, I'm afraid, which means that they may well require less buying or borrowing of talent."

"We've heard a lot about technology, economic uncertainty, skill shortages, leadership growth, and the future of work.  And we've challenged ideas and shared experiences and hopefully left with a few more answers than when we first arrived this morning. Although if you're anything like me, you've probably also left with a few more questions. And perhaps that's no bad thing, because in a profession built on connecting people with opportunity, curiosity, which has been mentioned a few times today, remains one of our greatest strengths. 

My first lesson is that organisations don't succeed because of structures, strategies or governance frameworks. They all help of course, and you must be reassured that REC have got fantastic governance and it's evolving all the time. But organisations succeed because of people. The privilege of this role has been working alongside a talented chief executive, Neil Carberry, talented and committed board colleagues. We've got some amazing people on our board and members of every size and sector who care deeply about our profession. Not to at least to mention the brilliant executive team and team we have at the REC. Leadership isn't about being the smartest person in the room, it's about making sure the smartest thinking in the room gets heard. 

Lesson 2. Recruitment has become truly global. The recruitment industry no longer operates within national boundaries. We talk a lot about the British, UK recruitment market, but talent is global, competition is global and opportunity is global. And a candidate sitting in Manchester can work for a company in New York managed from Singapore on a team spread across 3 continents. That is already happening, and generative AI will spearhead that model into the future even further. The world has become smaller, but our responsibility has become bigger, and REC must look at recruitment through a global lens, not just a national one. 

Lesson 3. AI changes everything and nothing, no speech about the future will be a complete without mentioning AI. And there's been such a lot said today about about AI itself. AI is already transforming our labour markets and how we source, access, assess, communicate and operate. But after three years in this role, reinforced by actually all that we've heard today, I am really convinced truly of one thing. Technology may change the process of recruitment, but it doesn't change the purpose. People still want to be understood. Employers still need trust, Adam said this morning. Trust is in is emerging as the new economy. Careers are still built on relationships. The future of work may be powered by technology, but it must remain centred on humanity. AI can help us find people, but only people can truly understand people. And here's the opportunity."