This is a rapid deterioration from July last year when the company found the market to be ‘reassuringly normal’. At the time, however, Barclay Simpson warned that European economic uncertainty was a threat: “Uncertainty undermines confidence and recruitment markets run on confidence.” Those warnings have now come home. For the moment, companies are still advertising vacancies, but are becoming increasingly unlikely to fill them.

The report warns that unless the Eurozone financial crisis is resolved, things will only get worse. “The alternative is almost surely a recession which will stall the recruitment market as companies stop even the pretence of recruiting", the report noted. "Recruitment and headcount freezes will become prevalent and redundancies are likely to follow.”

The only sector currently holding firm is the information security sector. Until recently, notes Barclay Simpson, things had been different. Infosec was one of the first and hardest hit recruitment sectors in times of economic uncertainty. Now things seem to have changed. Although job placements are certainly lower, “the information security recruitment market is currently holding up better than other areas of corporate governance.”

Infosec has moved up the political and commercial agenda because of increasingly high profile cyber attacks and data leaks. Business continuity placements are particularly buoyant, and the number of infosec practitioners actually grew during 2011. Although Barclay Simpson doesn’t believe that this growth is continuing, it is confident that “if another recession does come to pass, information security practitioners are unlikely to face redundancy as readily they have done in the past.”