Looking forward, we believe the 2023/2024 recruitment market will remain buoyant, with an excess of vacancies when compared to the available talent pool.

41% of our clients indicated they expect to hire in their corporate governance functions in 2023. This is a slight decrease from the indication our clients gave us at the beginning of 2022, when we found 48% of firms indicated an intent to hire in the year. Due to the ongoing demand for candidates, we expect salaries will continue to increase and a 13-18% salary increase will become the norm for individuals moving companies.

With the current economic uncertainty and the need to deliver on projects that were paused in 2020/21, we expect firms to increase the use of contractors both on an inside and outside IR35 basis.

Given the current reporting requirements for UK listed businesses and the expected consultation by the regulator in the first half of 2022, we expect firms to continue to focus on their Diversity & Inclusion policies and hiring during 2022. Financial services businesses will continue to develop their ESG strategies, especially given the introduction of the FCA’s ESG Sourcebook.

This will put a focus on firms trying to hire individuals with prior knowledge and experience in this space.

Risk

We expect the risk market to remain buoyant across all areas in 2022. Operational Resilience and Third-Party Risk management will dominate the non-financial risk market. Firms will continue to enhance their financial risk functions with the development of their internal models. To facilitate this the highest demand will be for candidates with programming languages such as Python & R. Given the continued economic uncertainty financial services business will look to strengthen their credit risk teams and will require candidates with strong modeling and in-depth analysis skills.

Compliance

With the ever-increasing regulatory burden, we expect 2022 to be a busy year for compliance/financial crime teams and in particular those individuals who can assist with horizon scanning and policy work. There will be significant regulatory change and development around sustainable finance, financial crime, and consumer protection. With the anticipated regulatory divergence between the United Kingdom and European Union, we are expecting to see an increase in opportunities and the highest salaries for those with expertise in EU-regulations.

Audit

An audit team’s overarching view of a business has always meant their teams have been challenged by the diversity of their work and 2022 will be no exception. Audit teams will have to assist the business on areas including; consumer protection, ESG, resilience and digitalisation to name but a few. This is likely to lead to an increase in job volumes and for larger teams to increasingly hire specialists rather than generalist auditors. Smaller firms will have to rely more on outsourcing for specialist audits such as cyber security. Candidates who can demonstrate strong IT audit and/or operational resilience experience will be in the highest demand.

For all areas of corporate governance businesses now need to have a clear recruitment strategy that articulates what they offer as a business to employees beyond salary and flexibility. An offering of work from home will no longer be used to offset salary as this is a part of the ‘new normal’ with over 90% of businesses allowing it in some capacity.

 

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