Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Dealing with Redundancy

New figures released today have confirmed that the ESRI have predicted that unemployment in Ireland will reach 17% by the end of 2010, and that Ireland will be hit harder than any other industrialised country by the recession we find ourselves in.  To be honest I am a little shocked.  Shocked that we could be the worst in the developed world, but when I look at who is steering the ship it makes sense...

More and more people are finding themselves out of work through redundancy, and I met with someone last night at a Recruiting Networking event that has put together a site called survivingredundancy.ie.  It has good information for both employers and employees on it.  

The Recruiting Industry seems dead at the moment.  Looking at the usual job boards, I have never seen such low activity.  Irish Jobs for example only have 26 Software Dev roles advertised , which represent just 13 companies.  From talking to internal recruiters it appears they are going to focus strongly on hiring directly from candidate pools and avoiding the use of any third parties.  Neither Bank of Ireland or AIB have a single IT job advertised, sign of the times indeed.  So what is to be done?  Where is the activity going to come from?  Is what the ESRI saying going to turn out to be true?  Do we have to wait until we hit rock bottom at the end of 2010 before we can recover?  So many questions!!  DISCUSS!!