Agency workers regulations seminar date announced

The draft Agency Workers Regulations guidance has been published today (Thursday, March 31)

We, along with many others in the sector and our governing body the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, will be examining the details over the next few days in order to submit a response in the two week consultation period that has now begun.

The deadline for compliance is now just six months away and we’re in the midst of working with clients, developing Impact Assessments to form a basis for building a strategy to deal with the change in regulations.

These conversations – and the newly published guidance – will be the starting point for the presentations at our AWR special employment law seminar – now in the diary for Thursday, June 9.

The main speaker will, as usual, be Hegarty LLP partner and employment law expert Martin Bloom. He’ll be going over in detail the things businesses need to be aware of and providing hints and tips as to how processes can be tweaked to ensure all requirements are met.

To pre register your interest in place at the seminar please get in touch.

From small acorns…

We shunned our trouser suits and laptops in favour of wellies and anoraks for a morning – quite literally – in the field.

As an agency we have pledged to support the Forest for Peterborough initiative by planting a tree for each member of our team – and one for every candidate we place in a permanent position throughout the year.

And when we say ‘planting’ we mean actually planting.

Which is why a bunch of us found ourselves, spades in hand, at Thorpe Meadows, preparing to dig.

We were delighted to be joined by some of the candidates who have recently started new jobs through us – and the clients who employed them. It was a real team effort and while we didn’t quite plant an Anne Corder Recruitment forest we certainly added a good amount of saplings to what will one day grow to become a beautiful woodland habitat.

Anne Corder Recruitment scores green again

We’ve only gone and scored ourselves another environmental accreditation – and this one at the highest level possible.

After undergoing one of the toughest audits I’ve ever seen we achieved a ‘green’ level award from Investors in the Environment – and that’s even better than a bronze and silver in this instance!

When I say tough I mean tough – the auditor actually went through our bins and noted that some of the lids hadn’t been removed from bottles in the recycling waste! That makes our achievement even sweeter – it certainly wasn’t an easy win!

The scheme is led by Peterborough Environment City Trust (PECT) and has been designed to help businesses in and around the city save money and reduce their impact on the environment.

We had to meet a host of criteria – demonstrate an improvement in resource efficiency with utility bills to prove it, have a workable recycling system, adopt a green travel plan, take a carbon footprint test….the list was extensive.

Even so, the auditor told us we had exceeded the requirements in some areas.
So do forgive us if we allow ourselves a little pat on the back.

* We’re still keen to work with other businesses to help demonstrate how adopting even a strand of our paperless working strategy could improve your eco-credentials and efficiency. Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss this area of our work.

Sharpest rise for almost four years

‘Strong and accelerated rises’ – that’s a phrase we haven’t heard in relation to the job market for a long time. But, according to the latest figures, it is apt.

We feed information into the monthly Report on Jobs, published by the REC and KPMG and February’s figures are looking good.

Permanent placements increased at the sharpest rate in 10 months. Temporary billings fared even better with the greatest rise since May 2007 – that’s almost four years.

And it wasn’t just appointments that scored robust growth. The overall level of vacancies showed the strongest rate of increase since last April. There are more candidates in the market too – especially those looking for temporary work.

Of course, any positivity these figures generate – and they certainly should generate some – has to be tempered by what is happening in the public sector. While the private sector is hiring, the public sector is shedding jobs. The Report on Jobs shows that while the IT and computing sector saw accelerated growth over the last 12 months, nursing, medical and care sectors have declined.

The REC’s chief executive Kevin Green described the situation in the UK as a ‘two speed labour market’. He also anticipates unemployment will continue to rise until the end of this year before starting a slow decline into 2012.

We certainly believe the overall findings of the latest national figures are reflected here in Peterborough and hope the positivity generated helps push the local economy forward over the coming months.