Freezing March…brrrr brrrr

I think that’s what we’ll remember it for; no day was complete without at least a 15 minute chat about how cold it was! We huddled around our PCs for warmth and barely left the office.

I think the rest of the MR industry must have been doing the same which meant that we were able to catch up with lots of you and registered some very interesting new clients. Once again, this year we have found that our new clients are not traditional MR agencies but a real mix of marketing services and clientside and we are really pleased to be able to create these opportunities for our candidates.

Final plans have come together and we have now everything in place for our contracting service. This month we had 5 temps out so a really positive start and a great new service we can offer to both our clients and candidates.  It’s a really great way to fill a gap for both the employer and the employee and for the employee it is a chance to sample a range of new environments. The website will be updated soon and there will be information on how to contract and the best ways to approach it as a career.

We’ll keep you posted via our Twitter feed @hassonassociate and our LinkedIn status updates. Another first for us this month was that as well as attending the MRS Conference, we contributed to one of the sessions – thanks to Freshminds for the invite. The session was “The Skills Debate” and it was really well attended and a fairly controversial session. We debated the importance of academics, age and once again the ability of the agency researcher to communicate with the client. It was really interesting and I hope it’s the start of a debate which continues throughout the industry; there are definitely some opportunities which are missed because of rigid approaches to hiring.

Make sure you are following us on Twitter @hassonassociate or @researchcareers for random and also relevant tweetings on life in MR recruitment.

Let’s hope we’re going to have sunshine in April and another great month for the research, insight, analysis and planning industry.