The availability of sales executives hobs that pay more than £25,000 per year is on the increase as printers attempt to “trade themselves out” of the economic downturn, according to recruitment specialist Harrison Scott.
The company reported an 18% drop in vacancies under the £25,000 mark, coupled with a 3% rise in vacancies above the £25,000 figure compared to the same three month period last year.
George Thompson, joint managing director of Harrison Scott Associates, said “Many companies are trying to trade themselves out of this downturn and are looking to high-calibre sales staff and high-performance execs to help them do this.”
He added “I used to tell clients that the demand for sales staff in print in the South East was 10 companies chasing one sales executive, my view is that it is more like 12:1 now.”
The increased demand for higher–paid sales executives resonated with Gary Smith of Redactive Print Management who added that people are “looking for bigger wages with possibly less commission”.
“What we found when we recently recruited a sales rep with a basic £25k pa is that we have very few candidates.”
Andrew Brown, corporate affairs director at BPIF said that the increasing popularity of electronic ordering systems, such as web-to-print, was helping to take out the indirect costs, such as estimating for the smaller, short-run jobs.
“Companies could be more likely to concentrate their sales forces on the bigger accounts where the larger jobs lie,” he said.
These figures could be showing that the more experienced staff are being taken on to handle such work, while demand for lower rank is jobs decreasing.”