Greater London
Overall Average Salary £71,128
Advanced professional £104,674
Professional £69,689
Managerial £61,319
Operational £41,403
Tactical £33,313
London – Kate Langham Business Director - Private sector & Linda Todd – Business Director Public sector
Private sector
What a few years it has been! The London private sector market has seen a fairly consistent job flow, with some ebbs and flows between temporary and permanent hiring. The back end of 2022 into early 2023 saw peak interim job flow (95% of this being inside IR35), whereas now the focus on company hiring is with permanent and fixed-term heads. Compared to the year before, we have experienced a strong increase in job flow totalling + 53% compared to summer 2022.
This shows great sentiment in the market, however, the recruitment challenge here is ensuring companies have the right selling points that they can display to candidates at the interview stage. As there are so many more job opportunities for candidates, they really do have the pick of the crop and interview processes are very much about the candidate interviewing the employer as much as the other way around. Companies offering greater development opportunities for the more junior procurement professionals are often being selected by candidates. For the more senior and interim professionals, flexibility and home-working are coming out on top as the main deciding factor for these workers.
In the interim world, we are seeing companies that are not moving on their daily rates are losing out on candidates. In London, anything less than £500 per day within any category will not be enough to secure talent in the current market. Strong contractors are being retained and extended therefore companies are having to up their daily rates in order to entice contractors (especially if the role is inside IR35).
A skill shortage remains in the public sector procurement market, and this is enhanced due to an ongoing mismatch between candidates’ salary expectations vs. employers’ salary packages and expectations of their experience.
Public sector procurement vacancies are at an all-time high and current demand is strongest at the Category Manager and Procurement Manager level. We are seeing a large skills gap at this level with qualified management-level candidates vs the salaries on offer.
We are seeing vacancies across all sectors but the most demand lies within the charity not-for-profit sector, local government, and the NHS.
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*The five competency levels are taken from the CIPS Global Standard and represent core skills and tasks identified at each advancing stage of the profession.