UK Firms Recruit Laid-Off Tech Workers as Part of Digital Innovation Strategies

It appears no country has been spared from the successive waves of layoffs taking place in the technology industry this year.

The U.K. for example, has felt the effects of slowing investment and macroeconomic headwinds despite its large and diverse tech sector, with companies ranging from the smallest startups to established players forced to drastically cut their headcount.

But to paraphrase the well-known adage, “one firm’s loss is another firm’s gain.” In fact, two non-tech firms have recently moved to tap into the rich talent pool, pointing to a growing trend across industries to scoop up talent unlocked by tech layoffs and hiring freezes.

In the first instance, U.K.-based carmaker Jaguar Land Rover announced earlier this month that it is embarking on a global hiring drive to recruit new digital and engineering talent from the pool of laid-off tech workers.

“Following the news of large-scale job losses from technology firms, Jaguar Land Rover is opening a new jobs portal for displaced workers from the tech industry to explore career opportunities,” the company stated.

Even as hyper-digital, startup-centric sectors like FinTech firms struggle to find their place in the austere new economic reality, Jaguar Land Rover’s interest proves that the digital skill sets that have fueled their innovation boom are just as valued in other industries.

A browse through vacancies posted on the company’s jobs board reveals that Jaguar is hiring dozens of software developers in fields such as cybersecurity, data science and cloud computing at its technology hub in Manchester, England.

In fact, freshly redundant programmers will likely be relieved to discover that programming languages like Python and C++ that reign supreme in web and app development are also in demand in the modern automotive industry.

Related: Sezzle CFO Taps Front-Facing Tech Talent To Support Back-Office Automation

And while expertise in microcode and low-level programming languages may not be as widespread in app development, layoffs at infrastructure operators will also free up programmers with transferable skills suited to Jaguar’s multi-tiered requirements.

Leading U.K. financial institution (FI) Barclays is also looking to take advantage of laid-off staff in the local FinTech sector, with the bank’s COO, Mark Ashton-Rigby, announcing an extension to its Rise Startup Academy on LinkedIn last week  in response to job cuts in the tech sector.

In the post, Ashton-Rigby invited FinTech entrepreneurs affected by recent layoffs to apply for Barclays’ equity-free startup accelerator, while at the same time pointing to the 3000-odd tech roles open on the bank’s careers site. “When one door closes, another one opens and out of adversity can come opportunity,” he said.

International Layoffs Present Cross-Border Hiring Opportunity

As well as ex-employees of U.K.-based FinTechs like Curve and FreeTrade, Barclays also has a chance to attract laid-off workers from multinationals like Stripe.

Even rival banks may provide new hires for Barclays, with the likes of Citigroup and Credit Suisse currently in the midst of major restructurings that will likely see their London-based workforces subject to staff reductions.

Read also: Citigroup Investment Banking Unit Slashes Staff Globally

And in their search to attract new hires, businesses don’t need to limit their recruitment initiatives to the domestic market. In fact, as PYMNTS research has revealed, the approach businesses take when hiring across borders differs depending on their size.

A recent PYMNTS and Nium report, “Meeting the Demand for Cross-Border Hiring: the Role of Private Agencies,” found that companies with annual revenues of over $1 billion, a category that includes both Barclays and Jaguar Land Rover, are the most likely to use their business networks to find international talent (Fig. 1B). Conversely, these firms are the least likely to use private agencies for international recruitment.

These companies are also the most likely to be interested in innovative payment solutions to meet the requirements of international payroll.

The data shows that firms that don’t use private agencies and rely on their business networks to recruit international workers are 24% more likely to be very or extremely interested in payments innovation than firms that use private agencies to recruit international workers.

Moreover, further analysis reveals that 28% of firms that don’t use private agencies place a high priority on innovating their payment methods, compared to 23% of firms that do.

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