Your 60 second guide to customs & global trade recruitment in November

If you read our 60 Second Insights for Indirect Tax, you'll recall that we branded November as a 'transition month' in its lead up to a party-fueled, festive themed, and broken up conclusion to the year. Throw in a bit of World Cup and we have a month that is be predictably distracted from recruitment.

We'd love to be proven wrong, but November tends to mark a point when businesses either focus on wrapping up their recruitment processes to secure some December or January new starters. Admittedly, there are many businesses who look ahead to the New Year by releasing new roles but, on a macro level, we tend to see a slight downturn in new vacancies.

What's happening in the in-house market?

• As such, there was a 13% decrease in in-house customs & trade roles across the UK&I, BENELUX, and DACH in November ??
• 41% of all roles were in the UK&I, followed by the BENELUX region at 28%.?
• 60% of these were at the Analyst / Senior Analyst grade, this has been consistent over the course of 2022.?
• This was followed by Managers / Senior Managers at 25%, indicating a slight decrease in the number of senior roles in comparison compared to October.
• For the Harvey John team, excise experience has been the skill demand of the month. This certainly bears no reflection on the wider market, but we seem to have been engaged in more excise related searches than usual.
• On a macro level, though, trade compliance remains the key focus, with nearly half of all of November's new vacancies demanding this expertise.
• This is the first time in 2022 that Manufacturing & Engineering has not been in the top 3 hottest sectors. Our top sectors this month was:

?? Logistics 20%

?? Pharma/Biotech/Meditech? 15%

?? Food & Beverage 12%

?Professional Services

• There still remains a handful of top tier firms hiring customs professionals but, admittedly, this has slowed down from what we saw earlier in the year.
• Earlier this year in the UK, there were several noticeable senior appointments made and we saw the following of team members in subsequent months. As such, hiring in the top tier has been relatively quiet in Q4 to date, but we suspect that some of the Big 4 teams will need to plug some gaps fairly soon.
• Across Belgium, Netherlands, and Germany, the demand for Managers and Senior Managers continue but recruitment at the associate grades is few and far between.
• The realms of customs technology is an emerging space and what has followed through to November is some of the continued demand to hire research & content professionals in the space. The demand remains small but it's a market that we expect to get a bit noisier as we move into 2023.

That's all for November, folks! We'll be back again at the end of this month to report on December's trends... All in 60 seconds, of course.