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​2022 has kicked off at full speed with businesses across the UK powering forward with their hiring plans in order to get ahead of the year and whatever ups and downs it may throw our way.

This means the MERJE team is firing on all cylinders to provide our clients with the best hiring support possible going into the new year.

In the midst of the hustle and bustle, we’ve just about had time to look back on 2021 to reflect on the achievements we had and the challenges we faced.

​We’re very pleased to say that we partnered with over 220 different businesses last year, which is a 56% increase on 2020 – a somewhat expected rise given the onset of the pandemic – and a 29% increase on 2019, back when the recruitment market was operating at normal levels pre-Covid.

2021 saw us achieve a 71% repeat business rate and over half of our clients hiring two or more individuals through our services. In fact, 21% of our partners hired five or more individuals and five businesses took on over 20 candidates thanks to MERJE’s expertise.

Across our range of specialist areas, we paired 757 industry professionals with fantastic new permanent and interim roles.

Broken down, this comprised of 44% female placements and 32% BAME placements, and we’re continuing our commitment to improving diversity and inclusion in our clients’ companies as well as our own, as laid out in our MERJE Together pledge.

Compliance Manager was our most placed job title, which is unsurprising given that our Compliance team is one of our most established disciplines, along with Finance and Risk Management.

Meanwhile, our newer specialisms of Actuarial, Insurance & Claims, Legal and Scotland have grown significantly and have exciting expansion plans in front of them.

Throughout the year, we tapped in to our many years of recruitment expertise to share 83 insightful and informative articles covering a huge range of topics.

We called on our consultants to share insights about their markets, like this Fin Crime chat with Pritesh, and Kirstie’s research into the popularity of flexible working.

We collaborated with thought leaders to discover their views and comments on a variety of subjects, such as our exploration of appropriate interview attire, Ryan Swann’s musings on the future Chief Risk Officer and our many Q&A sessions with industry professionals.

And we continued to promote business best practice with our advice on matters such as diversity and inclusion, greenwashing, disability inclusion, effective leadership and many more.

2021 also saw us redesign our website to create a more modern, sleek look and easy-to-use experience.

At the beginning of last year, we laid out ambitious plans to increase our headcount as we looked to the future of the business and how we could improve our offering to clients and candidates.

We’re pleased to report that we added 12 fantastic new team members throughout the course of 2021, all of which have been a superb addition to the team overall and are bringing great levels of drive and expertise to their specialist areas.

In other team news from the last 12 months, we invested in some advanced training for our consultants to support their career progression, awarded 27 spins of our Wheel of Fortune, celebrated a range of promotions and appointed a new Marketing Manager.

Being free of the many restrictions that were in place through 2020 and the early part of 2021 meant the return of MERJE socials, something we’ve thoroughly missed as we do love a good get together!

Our individual teams and the business as a whole managed to gather on multiple occasions to celebrate our successes as the year progressed, and we have plenty more to come in 2022 as well.

Speaking of celebrating success, we received 50 wonderful 5-star Google reviews last year, not to mention the many LinkedIn recommendations and feedback forms that were submitted from clients and candidates through our website.

It’s always great to hear when our team are doing a fantastic job so we can recognise their efforts and we relish any opportunity to improve our services, so the feedback is much appreciated.

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All in all, another great year for our business, one which we’re especially proud of as we looked to bounce back from the challenges that 2020 brought.

Now, we look forward to the year ahead; to collaborating with new and existing clients, working with more ambitious candidates, expanding our team even further, developing and improving our service offering and all the other exciting projects we have in store.

Thank you again to everyone who worked with us to make 2021 the year that it was, we can’t wait to see what 2022 brings!

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