Equal opportunities at work | Recruiters Weekly News

Equal opportunities at work. Tax changes mean IT specialists are exiting the public sector, just as Amazon expands its tech expertise. Transparency may be the key to solving the great BBC pay debate; and on which day of the week are you most likely to go job hunting?

BBC pay debate: Employers urged to publish wages

Equal gender pay has again become the topic of hot debate – a fact which in itself demonstrates that perhaps there is still a long way to go before pay parity is achieved in the workplace.

Sparked by the BBC’s publication of the salaries paid to its highest earning talent, concern has been voiced from several sources as to the extent of the gender disparity.

It has led one recruitment industry expert to call for industry-wide transparency on the subject. Jo Sellick of the Sellick Partnership wrote: “if businesses have nothing to hide, they will openly publish this data, and work on addressing any issues that arise.” Mr Sellick said that without an active change, businesses would be free to “continue talking about future targets and plans, without any real action to make improvements”.

Currently, there is very little incentive – and no legal obligation – for businesses to publish details of gender pay disparity within their company.

IR35 impact report

The public sector has been disproportionately effected by the changes to IT35 tax law, a new study has revealed.

Since April 2017, IT contractors working for public bodies have been the subject of a reclassification, meaning they are now taxed as employees. This has led to often substantial reductions in income for many IT specialists.

According to one survey of a thousand IT contractors, conducted by tech recruitment specialists CW Jobs, more than one quarter (27 per cent) of contractors have seen a reduction in take-home pay of between 21 and 30 per cent. 83 per cent believed that the private sector was now the most desirable place to seek new contracts.

Dominic Harvey, director at CW Jobs said that Britain’s public sector faced a “perfect storm” of a skills shortage, uncertainty over how current projects will be delivered, and the rising costs of short-term workers who choose to remain in the public sector.

Amazon UK grows tech expertise

In the week when Amazon chief Jeff Bezos officially became the world’s richest man, the international retail giant announced that its London operations were to be expanded, creating around 450 new high tech roles within the company.

As the retailer prepares to open its UK Headquarters in Central London, it revealed that the new premises would include a development centre, which would take its on-site workforce from 450 to 900 staff. Of the jobs being created, most will be technical roles such as software engineers, design and UI experts, and data analysts – many of which will focus on developing the Amazon Prime brand of streaming video services.

We all want a new job on Monday mornings

One of the worst kept secrets in recruitment is that the majority of job searches are made by people who are already in employment – some studies claim that as much as 90 per cent of all on-site searches are performed by people currently in work.

This week, one job site has gone a step further in exposing the secret career-change aspirations of Europe’s workforce, by revealing the time of the week when the sharpest spike in search traffic occurs: and it is Monday lunchtime.

Indeed, the web’s biggest jobs site, analysed the browsing habits of its user base over five European countries and discovered that seemingly everybody – from Dublin to Dusseldorf – is thinking about a career change at 12pm on a Monday.

While this data may conjure up an amusing image of Europe’s workers all swapping jobs after the weekend, it is actually rather useful information for every recruiter to take note of. It may help when planning the timing of a new recruitment drive or candidate search. It seems that if you want to win the most clicks for your vacancy, you had better have it online by first thing Monday.