You only have to watch the news or look at the vacant shops on most high streets to realise the state of the economy and I like most recruiters have found a majority of regular clients are not hiring or are in fact making redundancies.

However the real condition of the job market really hit home on Tuesday morning following the Easter brake.  I placed an add on the Thursday before Easter for an IT support engineer to work in London with a pretty respectable salary of up to £35,000.  I already had 2 or 3 good candidates in mind but placed the add to see if any superstars would apply. 

Normally for a job like that I would expect between 20 and 30 applicants and of those 30 maybe 5 or 6 would be suitable.  Tuesday Morning I logged into Outlook to find 340 CV's had been received in just 4 days!!!!  It’s now Tuesday night and I have only managed to read through the first 20 of them and speak to 2 or 3....... It’s going to be a long slog!  The worst part is that a of the first 20 I looked out a majority are currently out of work and about half where previously earning a lot more than £35,000.

Roll on 2010.