US recruitment firm Michael Page CEO Nick Kirk says the global hiring market has moved beyond the post-pandemic frenzy, but demand for skilled talent remains strong.In this interview with businessline, Kirk and PageGroup India Managing Director Nilay Khandelwal discuss hiring trends, AI-driven workforce shifts, GCC expansion, and why India remains one of the firm’s brightest growth markets.
How would you describe the recruitment market now?
Kirk: Trying to talk about today needs context. The last normal year we had was 2019, and we haven’t had a normal year since.Everyone knows what happened in 2020. If you’d said to me in the summer of 2020 - when I and most other people sat at home wondering what was going to happen in the world, and we’d never seen anything like this before - “Don’t worry, Nick, in 2021 and 2022 you are going to see the greatest recruitment market of your entire career” — which for me spans 31 years at Michael Page — I would not have believed you. Nobody would have believed you.There was no indication we were about to head into the greatest recruitment market of all time, but we did. Based on the results of not only our organisation but a number of our competitors as well, there was, through that two-year period, the greatest volume of movement of white-collar workers ever.Candidates came to market having reassessed their lives during the pandemic and decided that now was a good time to move. They felt they wouldn’t put up with their boss anymore or that they could do better. At the same time, a whole lot of organisations were transforming as a result of the pandemic. Retail organisations were moving from bricks to clicks and therefore needed to get rid of store assistants and rehire e-commerce experts.So there was mass transformation across multiple companies and a whole load of talent coming to market that hadn’t done so before. It was a perfect feeding ground for recruitment consultancies. We, like a number of other companies, benefited.We had our all-time record year in 2021 and then beat that in 2022. It was never better.I remember being with the leadership team in our Chicago office in September or October 2022. We were chatting about the types of offers candidates were getting. One of the managers told me he had a candidate go in for an interview, and after 20 minutes the client contacted the consultant and said, “He’s perfect. I’m going to offer him the job.”The consultant said, “Why don’t you spend another 40 minutes selling the job to him? Because he’s already got three other offers.”That’s how hot the market was. Candidates were moving for 15 per cent, 20 per cent, 25 per cent increases in salary. In addition to that, they were getting job titles they probably didn’t deserve, roles with responsibility they probably hadn’t earned, and flexibility around their relationship with the office like nobody had ever seen before
