Julie Holmes from Legal Island and Ryan Calvert, Head of Human Resources, Sales and Marketing Recruitment from MCS, provide an annual recruitment wrap-up, where Ryan delved into the latest recruitment trends in roles, pay and sector differentiators. Essential viewing to stay up-to-date with recruitment insights to gain a competitive edge in the talent market.

By understanding the latest trends and best practices, employers can tailor their recruitment processes to streamline them, resulting in time and cost savings by automating repetitive tasks and improving the overall efficiency of the hiring process. Learn about techniques to create a positive impression on candidates, leading to better engagement and increased likelihood of successful hires. From emerging job profiles to salary shifts and sector-specific demands, our expert will equip you with the knowledge to stay ahead.  Find Ryan's slides HERE: Ryan Unlocking the HR Advantage slides Presentation.pdf.

Recording:

Transcript:

Julie:   Hi, everybody. Welcome to our Lunch and Learn webinar, "Unlocking the HR Advantage: 2024 Recruitment Trends and Strategies", with MCS Group. My name is Julie Holmes, and I work as part of the Knowledge Team here at Legal-Island. Thanks very much for joining us today.

So today is a wrap-up of 2023 where we'll delve into the latest recruitment trends in relation to roles, what type of pay people get, and also some sector differences as well, as well as insights into how you can enhance your recruitment processes to attract high-quality candidates. And who better to talk to us about this subject than Ryan Calvert.

Ryan is the Head of Human Resources, Sales, and Marketing Recruitment at MCS Group. So thanks for joining us, Ryan. His approach is very personable, customer-service-focussed, and he builds sustainable working relationships with both candidates and clients.

Legal-Island's webinars and podcasts are sponsored by MCS Group, and MCS help people find careers that match their skill sets perfectly. They also support employers to build high-performing businesses by connecting them with the most talented candidates in the marketplace. If you're interested in finding out more about how MCS can help you, then head to www.mcsgroup.jobs.

So let's get started. To start off, we're going to do some of our own poll questions and find out how your recruitment experiences were in 2023.

So our lovely assistant, Maria, if you could share the first poll question for us, please. Great. Thank you. In your organisation, did job vacancies exceed hire rates in 2023?

Speaking to some of you informally at some of our events, a lot of you were having a little bit of difficulty with recruitment, so we'll see what happens now.

So if you just answer that for us, we'll get the results here. Thanks, Maria, for bringing that up so quickly for me.

I can see that the answer is yes, 63%. So we still have a lot of potential opportunities out there for people, and you can see that you're not in that boat on your own if you've been having difficulties as well. Again, Ryan has some insights to help you improve your recruitment and maybe attract more candidates as well.

So, Maria, if you don't mind sharing the second question for us, please. The second question is "What about your attrition rates? Did you find that they levelled off in 2023?" And again, you have a couple options there: yes, no, or you don't know because maybe you haven't been following that or worked that out yet.

Again, in your organisation, what about attrition rates? And again, we've got a little bit . . . I don't know, Ryan. What do you think? A little bit more spread out there?

Ryan:  Yeah.

Julie:   So attrition rates haven't really levelled off from the sounds of it. Thanks very much for that. And again, we've got some people that aren't too sure about that yet or haven't worked that out.

Last question. Get your thinking caps on and tell us in your organisation, what was the biggest recruitment headache in 2023? So we know that you had more vacancies than you expected. We know as well that you had a little bit of trouble with attrition, that it maybe levelled off in some organisations, not as much in others. So for the biggest recruitment headache in 2023, was it lack of candidates, lack of candidates with necessary skills, competition in relation to wages and benefits, restructuring, or you had no headaches?

So first sign, Ryan, is that we've got 0% for people saying that they didn't have any headaches at all. And then we can see that we've got other answers. We've got lack of candidates with necessary skills, so maybe lots of applications, but unfortunately not the person that can actually fit the role that we wanted. And then also competition in relation to wages and benefits.

I think, Ryan, that ties in very much with what you're covering for us today, doesn't it?

Ryan:  Yeah, it absolutely does. It's a massive headache that from speaking with a host of different clients across different industries and sectors, they've still got open roles. They could double or triple headcount or complete projects half the time if they could just find the talent, but they can't.

It's so difficult and it's so competitive and it's not sustainable to just keep pulling money from somewhere to pay people more money. It's just not a sustainable option longer term.

So, yeah, I hear the headaches. I'm surprised no headache? Did somebody say no headache? Zero per cent?

Julie:   The 0% was no headache, so everybody had some type of form of headache.

Ryan: Oh, right. Okay. I get it. Very good.

Julie:   We all know that recruitment unfortunately can sometimes give you a headache. And that's, again, why we have you on with us today, Ryan, to put everything right and give us some insights and help us with our issues as well.

So, saying that as well, we've got the question box if you have any questions for Ryan. I'm going to hand over to him now to do this presentation for you and give you those insights, but feel free to drop any of those questions in and we'll have some time at the end.

So I will leave you for the moment and Ryan will talk to you a little bit about what his findings are, and then we'll come back to you in just a moment. Thanks.

Ryan:  Brilliant. Thank you. Hi, everybody. Thanks so much for coming to today's webinar. So it's a bit of a recap on 2023 and probably some of the recruitment trends that I have seen personally and some of the things that my clients have seen.

So I feel that today's session is probably going to be a bit of a recap on some of the things that I have seen, and then looking specifically at some of those key challenges the clients have faced from a recruitment perspective and things that I feel if you as an organisation get right, it'll just make such a difference to your ability to attract and find those really, really hard-to-fill roles.

Next slide, Maria. So just to jump in and do a bit of an introduction on myself, I work for MCS Group and I am a divisional head and I oversee a couple of different areas, HR being the key one. It's the area that operationally I would recruit in. But I also oversee sales, marketing, and more recently legal. I've sort of added legal to the area that I oversee as well.

And again, I work for MCS Group. We are a specialist agency and we're in a good position because we've got that bird's-eye overview of what's going on in the market. We're able to see what private sector clients are doing, public sector clients are doing, and clients across a host of different industries of all different sizes from quite small SMEs through to quite large corporate global businesses.

So we're in a position where we really do see what happens and what works well. A lot of the time, it's just getting the basics right, and hopefully I'll cover that off today in a bit more detail.

Next slide. So just a bit of a recap on the key things that I'm going to cover off today. The first slide is going to cover off 2023 recap on trends and things that have happened over the past year.

And then we're going to dive into a few of the key areas that I feel I'm getting feedback from customers and I'm seeing it on a day-to-day basis that they really fall down on. And they're basic things. So things like recruitment processes not being slick enough, things like employee value proposition.

And it's not only having a great employee value proposition but also promoting it. That's where a lot of people fall down. They have a great EVP, but they don't promote it internally or externally. So if people don't know, it doesn't really exist.

And the last one is ESG, which for me is a fascinating area and it's an area that too many employers are not taking seriously. They're dipping into it, but they're just not doing enough. So, for me, it's a key area and it's a key thing that job seekers are looking for from their next role. We'll cover that off as well.

So if we just want to jump onto the next slide, this slide sort of covers off some of the key trends that I've seen over the past year. And for me, it was a turbulent year for a variety of different reasons. A lot of ups and downs.

 I think Q1 and Q2, there was a massive impact of quite large-scale redundancies across technology, which was significant. Clients like Meta and Amazon made large-scale redundancies, which had a massive ripple effect within the market.

And Q2 for myself, I'd seen a massive drop in job flow within HR and recruitment in general, which to be frank was quite worrying. I'll not lie. It was a bit worrying. But fortunately, things picked up.

And if we look at 2023 as a whole, the market really did flatten in terms of the job flow. And that's not a bad thing. It's not a bad thing at all.

If we reflect back on 2021 and 2022, we had seen around 150%, 155% increase between 2020 and 2021, which wasn't surprising given 2020 was COVID. And then end of 2022, there was a 35% increase in job flow. So the levels have flattened in 2023. They haven't really increased significantly.

However, what has happened is there have been a lot of changes to the makeup of the jobs that are coming through. So 2022, there were so many talent acquisition and recruitment-related roles coming through across a variety of different industries, but if I reflect on our own stats year-on-year, it was over 200% decrease in recruitment-focussed roles from 2022 to 2023, which was a huge indication of what was happening in the market.

However, the majority of recruitment-focussed roles that did come through last year came through in Quarter 3 and Quarter 4, which, again, it's a positive sign that there are a few green shoots coming through and the economy in different areas like tech is picking up, which is a great sign given how turbulent it was towards the end of 2022 rather and start of 2023.

One thing that I did see that was a really positive sign was the increase in generalist HR roles. There was a 14% increase in generalist HR posts, and there was a 20% increase in L&D and OD-focussed roles.

For me, it's probably coming down to so many clients struggling to fill hard-to-fill roles, and they know adding another recruiter to the team is not going to fix that problem. There are bigger issues here.

So they maybe look at OD specialists who may look at org design and developing the organisation, maybe looking at the company's culture to create something different to help attract employees to the organisation and help retain staff longer term.

And the L&D side of things, employers are just . . . it's so difficult to attract top talent to the company. They're expensive. It's tricky. So they look at L&D professionals to come in and look at apprenticeship programmes, look at graduate programmes, look at their overall workforce plans and what these really difficult-to-fill roles look like, and bringing in really experienced training professionals to ultimately help create this talent pool for the future and bring junior talent in and have structured learning and development programmes that will create this talent in the future for the company.

It's a much more affordable way to do it rather than going out and constantly overpaying for talent. It's not a sustainable option. And if you do continue to do that, you then have to look at internal pay parity. And if you don't, that's going to create disengagement internally. Yes, you may recruit somebody at a highly inflated cost, but you'll probably lose two or three other people and you're back to square one.

So they were some of the key trends that I'd seen. Overall job flow remained very similar, but a massive drop in recruitment-focussed roles in Quarter 1 and Quarter 2, and a decent increase in generalist HR roles, L&D roles, and OD roles in 2023.

Some of the specialist roles, such as reward, HRIS, operations remained very, very similar to 2022 levels. Again, a lot of these roles with SMEs will be absorbed within an HR Director's capacity or a Senior HR Manager's capacity, but a lot of those larger organisations will have these niche roles in place.

The other thing to look at is salaries. So salaries for HR generalists and specialists over the past number of years from COVID have increased steadily. So we've seen roughly around a 20% increase on base salaries for HR professionals from 2020 to 2022, which was significant.

But it just showed how impactful the HR profession was during that difficult time which was COVID, and they were rewarded. It was a high-demand talent pool. Organisations needed HR professionals to come in and to ultimately help them create a brilliant culture to help keep employees safe and help attract and retain top talent. So that was something that was significant.

And to give an example, this is a Northern Irish example, but it's just around HR business partner salaries. Pre-COVID, they were sitting around £40,000 to £45,000 on average, whereas now in 2024 they're much closer on average to £50,000, with a lot coming through towards that £55,000 level, which just shows in a couple of years we've seen a massive increase in base salaries for HR generalists.

Another key trend that I've seen is EVP and ESG. It's had a huge impact in 2023. And instead of increasing base salaries, a lot of employers they have increased their overall total reward offering, which is really exciting, the fact that employers are looking at that broader benefits offering, whether it's better healthcare, pension contributions, looking at their culture, looking at their flexible working.

And they're bringing in L&D and OD-focussed roles to actually action a lot of these key things that will ultimately feed into a better employee value proposition.

And just finally on this slide, a couple of other things to note is that a lot more employers are utilising both HR and recruitment analytics when they're hiring. Some analytics on the recruitment side, such as time to hire, offer acceptance rates, source of candidates, as well as some DE&I-related metrics, I've seen a lot of employers upgrading systems and embedding these key recruitment analytics and metrics into their overall recruitment process.

Another thing is artificial intelligence. So AI tools are versatile and they offer HR teams a number of applications, helping them complete many important functions in a faster and much more thorough way.

One of the key AI benefits for recruitment . . . Well, I'll give one example. It could be recruitment on-boarding. So verifying employee documents, conducting training, and handling basic admin tasks like providing access to company hardware and software, it's now becoming much more of an AI task.

And I see that being a trend that continues as the years go by, where a lot of the administrative tasks will be taken care of by AI, which I think will free recruitment professionals and HR professionals up to be more strategic and focus on those more value-added bits of work, which, again, is really exciting.

And the final thing there on trends was the remote work evolution. So that was a massive development in 2023 where we'd seen return-to-work mandates implemented by many clients and things like core days implemented by clients. They just felt their culture had disappeared completely from 2019. It was so different and they felt the only way to bring that culture back together was to bring people back into the office.

And that includes tech as well. Tech would be the area that would be probably the most flexible across all industries with relation to flexible and remote working. They would have done that pre-COVID.

But even some people in Northern Ireland or in Ireland could have worked for a London company, they're now being asked to go into the office a couple of days a week, which is just not a sustainable option. So that was another trend that had come through in 2023 that I thought was absolutely worthwhile mentioning.

Next slide, please. So this is one of the key areas that I had mentioned at the start that I feel a lot of clients are falling down on massively, and it's not helping them in their ability to attract and retain the best talent because the market is so competitive.

Companies can invest in a fantastic employee value proposition with market-leading benefits, but everything can just fall apart with a poor recruitment process. It's just a chance for an employer to give a great impression of themselves and what they do.

So, for me, I've put a few key takeaways on the slides, but I'll talk around them to give a bit of context.

So the first thing is an informal call.  A lot of clients I deal with have a very structured recruitment process, which is great, but it's too formal and it's too structured and they're not flexible.

You'll find that candidates coming on the market may see a role advertised by your company, but they're already at second stage elsewhere. If you have to wait for the closing date and then wait for this formal interview that's happening a week and a half after the closing date, that person will likely be off the market and they'll have no interest in your organisation because they don't know any better.

Whereas if you are inviting candidates in for an informal call to discuss their profile and make it a bit more personal, talk around the employee value proposition that that company offers, and how this role would potentially fit that candidate, that's going to get them engaged.

So even if they are interviewing elsewhere, they're more likely to stay engaged in this role and hold off on accepting another role because they're bought in. So it means you may not lose out on talent if you have that informal call.

And during that call, it's important to explain the process, to talk about who will be on the panel, how many stages, when they can expect to hear outcomes, setting those clear timeframes and deadlines.

It's really important to keep people engaged, because if they don't have that timeframe set, they probably will disengage if they don't hear anything and likely go through another process and take another role. And at that stage, you're fighting a losing battle.

As well, sell the company, talk about the EVP, talk about the reason that somebody should work for the company, talk about awards that the organisation have won. All those things are so important and they're great things to talk about at that initial informal call stage.

The next bit that I've seen a lot of issues is getting your internal stakeholders bought in. So don't rely on creating a great process, having your informal call, going through a first-stage process, and not being able to tie people down internally to that second stage or maybe even first-stage process and having it pushed out by a week or two because people internally are not organised.

Educate any hiring manager upfront on a recruitment process, what the timeframes will be, and when they will be expected to jump in to interview. And give them broad timeframes. Say, "This could be between this date and this date, but we need you to be flexible because this is for your team and I need you to jump into an interview on potentially a day or two's notice. But it's for your team". So I think it's getting that engagement and ensuring that people are flexible.

I've seen over the past year clients provide interview dates, and they give one or two days with a couple of times, and that is all they give. They're just really inflexible about it, which I understand because recruitment is not their only thing.

However, I feel that the flexibility around availability can lead to actually getting that right person through the door. You'll look back and you'll be so grateful that you did show a bit of flexibility.

The other thing is SLA. So I think it's important that every organisation has consistent service level agreements internally that they manage recruitment processes consistently against.

And that could be there's a certain timeframe that you get back to somebody who's applied or that you get back to somebody after an interview. Again, just ensuring that it's consistent. That's what's going to relay your brand positively to the market.

And that feeds into the last one, which is customer service. So, for me, it's so important that any organisation has clear and consistent communication. If somebody applies for a role, they get something through. Could be just a confirmation that it's been received. If somebody interviews, timeframes of that interview are managed properly, and the communication after that point is clear and it's consistent.

That can really disengage people if they don't hear. They could be the best candidate for the role, but if that's not communicated effectively, they won't know that and that could lead them to go and look at other opportunities. And that candidate can ultimately drop off, which is the last thing we want.

Another thing around customer service. If you think about the amount of roles you have . . . Say you had 30 roles, but you had 10 people apply for each role. That's 300 people. If you only focus on providing the successful candidates with the best customer service and the responsiveness, that's great for that pool of 30, but there's a pool of 270 people that have gone through the process that are out there in the market telling friends, family, colleagues about your organisation, about the recruitment process, about why they were not impressed at all. They didn't hear back after their first stage and they had to chase and chase to get some kind of feedback.

So that's why proper SLAs are really, really important, to make sure that they're consistent. And the customer service side of things where you're communicating to people on a consistent basis, you're rejecting people on a timely basis, you're feeding back consistently for me is so important. It can be the difference between you expanding as an organisation and you not.

So that's streamlining the recruitment process.

Next slide, please. So this is all around employee value proposition. It's something that's been talked about a lot over the past number of years, and rightly so. It's such an important area.

And it's an area that organisations can't just focus on increasing base salaries anymore. They need to look at the overall, all-inclusive total reward that a candidate is getting by joining an organisation. That includes so many things: great culture, great benefits, fantastic work-life balance, a great structured career pathway.

And it goes back to my initial point in a previous slide about an informal call to properly promote the EVP of working there and get people engaged. So even before this, employers need to promote the EVP as well. They can't just rely on having this great EVP. They need to promote that. They need to advertise that. That needs to be all over social media. It needs to be in the interview process. It needs to be talked around.

So some of the insights that I had picked up personally from a recent . . . It was a recent poll for EVP, and it was a couple of things that specifically HR professionals were looking for from their next role.

There were five key things. So they were good work-life balance, inspiring culture, open and effective management, flexible working arrangements, and excellent compensation and benefits. And interestingly, it was not compensation and benefits that had come out on top. It was actually good work-life balance and inspiring culture that had come out on top, with compensation and benefits sitting in fifth.

So I think that's probably why there has been such a focus in the past year on L&D roles and OD roles to create a fantastic culture, to maybe look at the structure of the organisation, the way the organisation operates, and create a better work-life balance for employees.

Maybe look at a four-day week, look at better hybrid working options, look at flexible working options. They're the things that, specifically in HR, people are looking for.

So you can't rely on just giving people more money. It's not going to be something that will motivate people longer term, and it's not going to be a longer-term sustainable option.

 And I think I did mention it earlier, but communication is key. So it's brilliant to have this all-singing, all-dancing employee value proposition that ticks all the boxes, but without promoting this internally and externally, you're just going to be fighting a losing battle.

So it's important that you're promoting that to as many potential job seekers that would sit within your specialisms as possible, as well as promoting it internally.

Talk to your internal employees, have town halls, have regular quarterly or monthly meetings where you're communicating what the company does, what the benefits package is, how competitive that is against other organisations. It's important that that's relayed on a consistent basis.

And just on to the next slide. Last but absolutely no means least is ESG, which I have found over the past year has been a key topic for a lot of employers who may have dabbled with it but they don't have a clear strategy, but they're starting to get on board, which for me is really exciting. It's something we need, if I'm being honest with you, even from an environmental perspective. We need more organisations to get on board.

So, hopefully, I'm not teaching you how to suck eggs here, but for anybody that doesn't know what this means, ESG involves considering the environmental impact of a company's operations, its corporate social responsibility initiatives, and good governance practices when making decisions.

And these elements are all based around the wider elements of the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals. These three factors are seen as the best embodying three major challenges that face corporations and wider society, things like climate change, human rights, and adherence to laws.

There are so many benefits to employers of having a structured and clear and deliberate ESG strategy. And one of those benefits is actually outside investment. It's what a lot of investors are looking for, and not just private investors but also government grants. A lot of these government grants are motivated by organisations that have that clear ESG strategy.

But even if a business isn't looking for investment, which potentially is unlikely but if you aren't, if that's not your key motivator, adopting an ESG framework has other benefits, such as reducing risk and lowering costs through to improving reputation and attracting new customers.

So, from a recruitment perspective, it's a massive impact on improving the brand's reputation, which is going to help the company attract not only new customers but attract talent and also retain talent if it's something that people are looking for. If your company doesn't have that structured, clear strategy, it will impact their ability to attract and retain talent longer term.

And it also really helps with better employee retention and productivity uplift. You're going to get happier people whose value to the company is not just all, if they're in the private sector, around the profits. There's something else there that they're motivated by and they're driven towards, and they want to genuinely make a difference.

Some of the other things would be cost reductions and increased profitability and top-line growth and regulatory compliance. They would all be benefits of a great ESG strategy.

And just to finish, we actually as an agency did . . . It was a survey in 2022, so it's probably a bit dated, but it was a survey, it was post-COVID, and it was on the correlation between ESG practices and attracting and retaining top talent.

It was basically a cross-section of candidates and employers across the UK, Ireland, and the U.S. And it was offering an insight into the how ESG and how the activities, policies, and practices can affect an organisation's ability to attract talent.

Some of the findings that came out of that survey . . . So 68% of organisations already have an ESG strategy in place, which might sound like a high number, but on reflection, there's 32% of employers that don't have any clear ESG strategy and they're maybe just dabbling. That's just not good enough.

Another really interesting stat from that survey was that 54% of organisations surveyed admitted that their approach to ESG has had an impact on their ability to retain and attract talent.

And probably the most interesting figure is that 77% of people now feel pretty comfortable asking prospective employers about their corporate values, their ethics, and their approach to ESG, and that this will ultimately play a huge role in someone accepting a role.

So if we look back at the webinar in its entirety, you could have the best benefits, the best work-life balance, you could have a highly profitable brand, you could tick every box basically, every box is ticked, but if you don't have an ESG strategy, that can be really important to somebody. And that could be the difference between them accepting a role and not accepting a role.

So aside from all the environmental benefits, social and governance benefits that a great ESG strategy has, it will ultimately help you attract and retain top talent, and it is a differentiator.

It's one of those things that if you're competing against other organisations for talent, which, again, you will absolutely be, this could be a differentiator that if it's created and it's well communicated to your target market, it will absolutely help you with your ability to attract and retain top talent.

As well as to do that, it's just important that once you have that strategy in place, you embed that on a day-to-day basis with managers and employees around how they're actually assessed on a day-to-day basis so that it is effective and, importantly, it actually happens. If it's not linked to what people are assessed on, on a day-to-day basis, it just won't happen.

So you'll be glad to know, folks, that that concludes today's session for me. Hopefully, it was useful. Maybe it wasn't. I don't know. But it's a lot of insights that I had picked up over the past year. I feel that the recruitment processes, ESG, and EVP were three key areas that people can and should focus on in 2024 if they haven't already done so, but they're things you can actually action pretty quickly. So, yeah, that's me.

Julie:   Thanks very much, Ryan, for that. And that definitely was useful. I mean, you shouldn't sell yourself short there. That was very insightful. Thank you very much.

It's interesting about the fact that you've used the words about flexibility and transparency quite a lot, and saying that a lot of employers have things in place but it's actually making people more aware, even their own employees, of those different strategies and what's going on to become internal ambassadors. 

Ryan: Yeah. I mean, whether it's an EVP or an ESG strategy, the worst place to create it is in an ivory tower in a boardroom or a senior leadership team meeting. You create that in conjunction with employees at all levels, across all departments, and create a clear action plan.

So make sure that that's filtered through to completion, and you have regular updates that happen, whether they're at quarterly meetings or monthly updates or annual meetings.

It's important that employees feel that the work they put into creating the strategy is actually being actioned. So the communication is so important. And if it doesn't happen, you've just wasted your time.

Julie:   And then we had a question as well about whether the trends that you'd mentioned more at the beginning of the presentation, is that strictly private sector or does that also include the public sector as well?

Ryan: That includes all sectors. So that was our own stats, and that was all Ireland. So that was across Ireland and Northern Ireland for both generalist and specialist HR positions across all sectors. So that was private and public sector.

Julie:   Great. And so then you talked a lot about the changes that there are to the HR roles and what ones are more popular now, what you're seeing. So we have HR professionals obviously joining us today. What would you recommend to future-proof your skills if somebody came to you and said, "What should I be doing, Ryan?" What areas would you go over?

Ryan: Generalist roles, we always say that a good generalist is always needed. Northern Ireland specifically is made up predominantly of SMEs, and a lot of those SMEs will want a generalist. They don't have enough budget for a specialist role, whether that's in reward or recruitment, or maybe it's an HRIS specialist.

I think for me it's hard to know. Analytics is a big one. I think AI as well is another huge one. And with AI becoming more and more prevalent, you're probably going to see more HR professionals and specialist HR professionals being able to focus on more strategic initiatives.

So OD could be an area that even if you're a generalist, focussing on that. I've seen a huge demand for OD specialists in 2023 because companies can't hire talent, they can't get people through, so they need to make internal changes, they need to look at their org design, and they need to restructure things. It's so important that that's done.

Julie:   So I guess also the related skills to that, even things like your communication skills, change management, and just taking a look at your CV and seeing what you've actually done and relating it to those different areas that you said about as well. So thank you very much.

I just also want to let everybody know that Ryan has kindly made his slides available. So those will be available, and the recording will be available as well.

So, Maria, if you just move on to the next slide for us, please. I think that everybody could agree that that was great. Again, we know what happened in 2023. We know what's coming up as well. So thanks very much, Ryan.

And thanks, Maria, as well for all your help with the polls. Thanks, everybody, for participating in those.

So, Ryan, as you're aware, is MCS Group. You'll have his contact details at the end of this slide.

And then for Legal-Island, we've just put up details of some of our upcoming events. So this is for Northern Ireland. As Ryan just mentioned about AI, you can learn how to streamline HR tasks, and make sure that your recruitment, you're getting hold of everybody and letting them know outcomes of different employment exercises. Again, a whole raft of ways to use AI that'll be useful to you, along with our other employment events.

And then for ROI, again, same thing. So AI, even the fundamentals of it, learning about how to add it to different processes, also the ethics of it, and how you actually go about designing your work processes. We've also got popular events too, like our sell-out Mock WRC Adjudication Hearing. It sold out last time. So, again, if you're interested in that, please get in touch and book your place.

Ryan, thank you very much again for that. That was useful. And as always, look forward to speaking to you soon. Thanks, everybody, for joining us.

Ryan: Thank you. See you all later.

Julie:   Okay. Thanks.

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