Your 60 second guide to indirect tax & customs recruitment in July 2023

“I’m currently on annual leave and will be returning [...]” - that’s right, the prevailing tune of the summer holiday season. It’s always the way: when school is out for summer, so is recruitment.

Unsurprisingly, the market has been slower than we’d like over the past couple of months but more so on the vacancy management side. The act of reaching the offer stage is a tedious task, so we are counting down the days until September.

Elsewhere, though, we’ve seen a slight uptick in July with new vacancies, which is encouraging, particularly as the market in general still appears to be quite cautious in response to rising interest rates and the fragility of the economy.

As our monthly indirect tax tracker indicates, both in-house indirect tax and customs & trade hiring bounced back in July across the UK&I, BENELUX, and DACH. Interestingly, Belgium is becoming increasingly more active than usual - as well as the Netherlands - which correlates with how they’re massively outperforming the rest of the OECD countries, most notably when we look at how ‘real wages’ across almost every OECD country has declined this year, except Belgium & the Netherlands. The UK&I continues to be a dominant hub of new activity, despite its bleaker outlook when it comes to ‘real wage’ performance. Although not necessarily impacting the decision to hire, it is having a graver impact on the demands of the candidate market, who are becoming increasingly concerned about salaries.

A snapshot of the grade breakdowns of last month’s hiring can be seen below. The most notable variance is a slight increase in the number of senior roles, with a few interesting director vacancies becoming available. If you’re a senior manager with oil and gas experience and looking to step up to become a director, check out this role which can be based in the UK, Spain, Netherlands, Italy, or Hungary.

The professional services market still remains quite lethargic compared to the urgency of hiring that we saw earlier this year but, again, July has seen a slight uptick in new vacancies - most notably across the top tier and top 20 firms. Much of the same can be said for the German market. Across BENELUX, hiring remains steadier.

Tax software houses have been relatively inactive for the last quarter now and the roles that we are seeing are predominantly the ones that remain unfilled from previous months. On the note of tax technology, we spotted a great cheat sheet recently from Robbert Verbeek . If you missed it, here it is below!

That’s all for now. As always,reach out if you have any questions and check out our current vacancies here.