2016 saw a bumper crop of new recruitment agencies, with over five thousand incorporated at Companies House – and the trend shows no signs of stopping.

Recruiters with ambition and non-recruiters with industry experience alike see opportunities. What they see is a need in their chosen market for permanent and/or contract staff, finding this either because they have access to a large candidate pool or a strong relationship with key clients (or both).

Seeing that potential for growth, they look to make their move – and the key sectors where that approach is thriving right now are:

Medical

Easily the top industry measured by enquiries we receive, many recruiters see the opportunities in nursing, social care, mental health, supply of medical locums, new spaces within GP surgeries, and more – especially in contract staff, which has major demand in both public and private sectors.

With the industry being supported by the government, invoice finance is easy to set up, too!

Teaching

With similar advantages to the medical industry, we’re seeing recruiters who work for larger agencies notice the rise in placement of supply teachers and teaching assistants and realise how much more they could make running solo.

IT

Always a strong sector, the IT market has shifted over the past two years to local placements rather than exporting our IT talent overseas. Individual clients often require multiple contractors for the same project, which means agencies have to be careful when arranging invoice finance due to concentration of risk. TBOS Freedom supports agencies tackling these issues at an early stage.

Construction/Engineering

Supervisors in construction are just as likely as recruiters to see the need in this sector and to try to set something up. Funding tends to be the biggest challenge as it’s one of the industries many funding providers are most cautious about and the sub-contract/application approach to invoicing also hurts.

Renewable Energy

Engineers moving away from offshore oil and gas are flocking to new renewable energy projects – meaning that for some years to come there’s expected to be heavy demand for good recruiters in this sector before the market stabilises.

Contracts and funding can be a challenge, in part due to 4 weeks on/4 weeks off working styles needing double the number of contractors, but it’s likely to be a profitable industry for some time.