More than half of UK employers planning to recruit staff

New findings come as latest official figures show unemployment topped 5 per cent in the run-up to Christmas.

More than half of UK employers planned to recruit new staff in the first three months of 2021, a survey has found, which experts have hailed as “the first signs of positive employment prospects in a year”.

Of the 2,000 employers polled for CIPD’s latest Labour Market Outlook, 56 per cent indicated plans to recruit in the first three months of this year, up from 53 per cent in the previous quarter and 49 per cent six months ago.

The news comes as the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show unemployment reached 5.1 per cent in the three months to December last year – the highest for nearly five months.

The ONS figures also revealed there were currently 726,000 fewer people in payrolled employment than before the start of the pandemic, of which nearly three-fifths were under the age of 25.

However, January did see 83,000 more people in payrolled employment than the previous months, the second consecutive month of growth, which the ONS described as “tentative early signs” of the labour market stabilising. 

The ONS data also showed the number of job vacancies in the three months to January was 26 per cent lower than the previous year. However, this is an improvement when compared to summer 2020, when vacancies had dropped by nearly 60 per cent.