At 7am on 11^th August, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) announced its quarterly jobs figures – finding that the UK had shed 750,000 jobs since the start of the Covid-19 lockdown.

In advance of this announcement, we advised our client, global technology recruiter, Harvey Nash that it should counter this generally negative news, with some more positive news regarding tech jobs.

This strategy even exceeded our expectations by landing a live interview for CEO, Bev White on the BBC’s flagship business programme, Today. The bar is very high for even having a client considered to appear on the Today Programme. In fact, this was the first time in over 20 years that we have managed to secure a live interview on the programme.

We also managed to achieve commentary on Sky Business News, Personnel Today, ZDNet, IT Pro and Forbes to name but a few.

Some of the commentary that was picked up included the following:

“While today’s ONS data casts a shadow over the UK jobs market, vacancies are now rising from their record low in April to June 2020 – as those sectors that have been less hit by the crisis such as Pharma, Logistics, Healthcare and Tech continue to create jobs.

Our research shows today that the majority of the UK’s tech leaders are either increasing or retaining their staff over the year ahead. Data from the 2020 Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey, which will be launched next month, shows that 82% of IT leaders in the UK expect their technology headcount to increase or stay the same. Skills that are in most demand are cyber security, architecture, organisational change, and cloud.

The UK’s tech leaders are also hiring across the country, with more IT leaders in the North West, in technology hubs such as Manchester, planning to increase their technology headcount over the next year than in London. Both of these cities expect to recruit for more technology roles than the UK average.”