The good old, bad old days...

The news of Margaret Thatcher’s death got us thinking about how like her or loathe her she shaped the way commerce operates today, which is something all businesses are directly effected by.

This article is not here to debate the rights and wrongs of her and her policies, we will not be discussing strikes or miners, we simply want to look at how the business community changed and how recruitment services grew as a result of her leadership. We don’t want a revolt!!

Under Thatcher’s government, the 80’s saw the privatisation of public services including British Airways, British Petroleum, British Aerospace, British Gas, British Steel and British Telecom. The effect this had on society was massive, the ‘Big Bang’ as it was called, meant London became known as one of, if not the, finance capital of the world, the countries debt was dramatically reduced and the rise of the ‘yuppie’ meant we had a whole new class of nouveau riche.

This is where commerce as we know it as a business term was established.

The growth of the UK’s business lead to further services being needed to manage the growing demands of the nation. New opportunities were identified as needed to run a growing and successful business, including accounts, human resources, advertising, IT and sales departments to name a few. Recruitment, although having been around for many years prior to the 80’s, benefited from this a massive surge in employment, putting together a specialist service directed at finding people with relevant skills in the emerging market to place in the newly created roles.

The love affair with recruitment companies continued well into the 00’s, but has in the last 5 years seen a decline in attitude towards them. Maybe this is because of employer’s access to alternative options, like social media and on-line advertising, maybe it is because some recruiters got lazy and greedy and provided a bad service and maybe it is because the last 5 years has been tough economically and companies need to tighten their belts where they can. Realistically it is a combination of all the reasons, but it is also a shame. We don’t just say that as we work in recruitment, but because if we went back to when recruitment was seen as an essential service providing relevant candidates to companies looking for people to help grow and develop their business that they may not find using alternative measures, we may be able to start to grow our economy again, much as it grew under Thatcher’s reign.