The past two years have turned the recruitment sector on its head, with the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic followed last year by the “great resignation”, as huge numbers of UK workers took stock of their career paths in the wake of the pandemic.
Along with the general increase in M&A that occurred during 2021, as dealmakers returned to the marketplace en masse, this helped drive M&A activity in the UK recruitment sector to a 10-year high by the end of 2021, according to a year-end report on the industry by BDO.
Factors including an influx of overseas buyers, growing private equity interest in recruitment and a heavily disrupted jobs market meant that sentiment was high going into 2022.
In spite of mounting challenges and an expected decline in M&A activity from the inflated figures seen in 2021, this optimism has largely been borne out. At the halfway point of 2022, figures show that dealmaking in the UK recruitment sector was only marginally below the corresponding period in 2021.
In November 2021, US cloud-based recruitment software provider Bullhorn Inc acquired UK-based cube19, a company providing analytics and reporting solutions for the global staffing market. cube19, a long-time partner of Bullhorn, uses its analytics to provide insights on staffing across all levels up to C-suite and is part of a wave of emerging technology transforming the recruitment sector.
Announcing the acquisition, Bullhorn said: “The acquisition of cube19 comes at a pivotal moment in the trajectory of the industry as a whole and addresses a critical need among senior staffing leadership."
Bullhorn added that its research had shown that staffing agencies “unanimously voiced a desire for truly real-time, actionable business intelligence and reporting that could help them connect their financial decisions to operations and delivery optimization and connect functions and business units towards improved service levels and growth. The combination of cube19 and Bullhorn provides exactly that.”
In April 2022, private equity firm Pricoa Private Capital, part of Prudential Financial, announced a significant investment in SPS (Specialist People Services), a UK recruitment firm providing labour solutions for the UK and international logistics market.
The investment will see Pricoa support SPS’s organic growth plans in the UK and Australia, as well as opening the possibility for the firm to target acquisitive growth in the UK and internationally.
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