Professional and management skills are still in short supply according to latest figures from the Recruitment Confidence Index (RCI).

The RCI findings, from the from Cranfield School of Management and The Daily Telegraph, show that more than 40% of organisations responding to the survey anticipate an increase in recruitment activity over the next six months.

The survey also shows that:

• The need to recruit managerial and professional staff remains high in engineering (60%), production (51%), sales (46%) and computing/IT (42%).


• The proportion of respondents expecting difficulties recruiting at board level has risen from 30% last quarter to 42% this quarter.


• And most organisations (88%) expect pay increases to fall in the 2-3% band, rising in line with inflation.

The increase in recruitment activity is, however, beginning to slow with 41% of the 1,249 responding organisations expecting overall recruitment activity to increase, compared to 48% last quarter, and 17% expecting it to decrease, compared to 12% last quarter.

Just under a third of these organisations (31%) expect recruitment activity for managerial and professional staff to increase compared to only 7% who expect it to decrease.

Organisations generally are experiencing fewer recruitment difficulties, especially in larger organisations.

Commenting on the findings Shaun Tyson, Professor of Human Resource Management at Cranfield School of Management, said: "There are signs that the labour market is easing somewhat in the face of uncertainty in business confidence, with lower levels of labour turnover and fewer difficulties overall, but the evidence so far is patchy. We need to see if this is a temporary phenomenon, and to look at the trends in future surveys to see what effects, if any, there are from recent events which occurred after this survey was completed. At the moment recruitment activity is still on the increase we believe."