November CTRM recruitment update with Carl Vellenoweth

In this month’s article, I would like to cover the involvement of social media, CTRM recruitment, and the growing demand for Metals CTRM talent.
As the festive season nears and most hirers unwind their needs, the recruitment market gears up to service the flood of job seekers as they consider options moving into the New Year. With projects coming to an end, bonuses due, renegotiations and contracts coming to close, over 35% of employed professional will naturally consider a move leading into 2015.

Recruitment & Social Media

Facebook alone has over 1 billion active users. Twitter is upwards of 560 million and Linkedin 240 million. This makes for some very powerful numbers, and these numbers don’t even count several other linkedin equivalents, such as Mavern, Viadeo, Xing and OilPro.

So, is the CTRM Technology job market reliant on social media? The first survey I conducted was to speak to 25 CTRM professionals of all levels and disciplines of how they go about job seeking, which provided some interesting results.

The graph is divided between first point of contact and success rate, landing a new position.

Talking to headhunters seems to be the preferred choice when exploring the job market, and in terms of first point of contact to success rate, reaps the best awards. Linkedin is the preferred option over job boards, but has a very low success rate landing a new role. There’s still value networking through own contacts and this has proven beneficial due to warm introductions and referrals.

The second part of the survey was on the hiring side to establish the first point of call for hiring new CTRM talent.

Here’s the results:

Many hiring managers seem to have their recruitment process managed by internal recruitment functions or human resources, however there’s very limited success stories hiring CTRM talent via internal portals; this maybe down to the hidden nature of CTRM skills, or a lack of CTRM market understanding. There was an interesting success story using Xing for a German hire and even though Linkedin seems to have a vast international database, only a limited number of candidates spend time updating their profile of checking their account for messages and inmail, this meaning turnaround times can be slow.

In whole, the study outlines that social media is not yet an instrumental tool when hiring new talent or seeking a new job; but an area where using social media has proved to be popular, is screening candidates. In fact, over 30% of hiring managers have rejected candidates based on their social media activity.

Metals Market & CTRM

One of the Key Focus areas for CTRM is the Metals markets, with the introduction of new warehousing rules, LMEsword, and the appetite for precious metals as investors look to diversify their investment portfolio.

As banks move further away from physicals due to volatility and regulation and align themselves with e-trading, we have seen a demand influx from asset-backed traders to purchase metal CTRM’s to adapt to their new Business processes.

As Q1 approaches for 2015, our research indicates that functional expertise will be required to implement Greenfield metal CTRM systems to help manage a complex system architecture.

Systems we expect to take market are Brady’s Trinity and OpenLink’s ENDUR/ FINDUR; also MS Dynamics for those that manage large logistic processes.

As spoken about in previous articles, Treasury and risk managers together are playing a lead role within corporate commodity price optimisation and procurement, driving demands for Treasury Management Systems that can manage CTRM whether it be for volume packaging/ Products or precious for hedging.

The integration of commodity risk and treasury within the business is mirroring that of the product developments within vendors. These functional skills outlined above for metals are of focus by ourselves and we forecast this to continue throughout 2015.

To support the trends we are experiencing, below is chart outlining E/CTRM registered jobs by industry sector for the month of November

November Summary
The CTRM recruitment market has maintained a strong momentum over the last 3-6 months and research indicates this trend to continue.

OpenLink’s Endur release of V.14 will create demand for functional and technical skills, mostly BA’s, PM’s and developers. Off the back of a strong new business year, Brady should start a more fruitful job market with their Fintec and Trinity solutions.

We look forward to a strong December, along with a focus on researching the CTRM market for new talent moving into Q1, as visibility increases from our clients.

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