Charlie Ryan The Recruitment Queen’s thoughts and comments:

A hung parliament…. Probably the worst scenario possible for the country when stability and certainty is required. I am beginning to feel across the country in general, that uncertainty and some instability is becoming the norm. There has been a real feeling on this Monday morning with our clients, of “business as usual” and no retreat on what they have been recruiting for. Yet within 1 week of the Brexit vote our business had only 20% of the work compared to the previous week before the vote.

Today this feeling is very different, there is a real sense of “nobody knows what they are doing in parliament and we have a business to run, so I am going to make my decisions until something becomes very clear to demonstrate I shouldn’t be going this way”.

We have had nearly a year of uncertainty since Brexit and businesses after about 4 months realised they just couldn’t wait for things to either settle, or the country to tell us what next. They realised that they had to continue on some of the roads they had committed to, albeit with a 4 month halt, as otherwise they wouldn’t have a business by the time the impact of what Brexit meant kicked in. So perhaps we have become more used to a little bit of uncertainty and we are dealing with it, by partially ignoring it until we understand it’s impact. And the election is just another expected piece of this up in the air puzzle which everyone knows will sort itself out eventually and hopes that it won’t have too big an impact on them when all the pieces land.

My opinions and experience is based around companies with 50 employees are less. And although many have been effected by the exchange rate, late last year they took other decisions to refocus on the value they brought to the market, where they could pass on that exchange rate difference to their clients. Imagine if they had decided to just sit and wait to see what happened!! Their clients would go elsewhere.

I think if nothing else we have learned in the last 12 months that we are resilient and it is this resilience which continues to allow us to see companies grow during this less certain climate. It is also this resilience which doesn’t allow us to give into the media which is constantly pushing for a lack of confidence feeling, potentially pushing us into recession. Our experience in the last 6 months has heard the businesses of this country saying “ let’s get on with our decisions and growing the company as if we wait for the impact of what the results of Brexit will really be, we might not have a company. “

A hung parliament, I think we can all agree that on Friday with this result, although we are not happy about it, I don’t think anyone is surprised anymore and just that feeling in itself is creating a more certain unified feeling for us, even if we are just coming to terms with the fact that uncertainty is part of what we have to deal with now.