The ability to match a company to a location or a company to the people it needs is an art no amount of computerisation can manage.

This is why our clients rely on the skills and experience of our consultants. Our work with recruitment agencies and businesses seeking to understand recruitment profiles in new or existing locations has evolved from our wider work on labour markets and economic regeneration. Many factors ultimately drive the availability, comparative costs and competing demands for various skills and these need to be fully considered.

Our Location Database^© and all recruitment analysis is based on what we term the Journey To Work Area (JTWA). This is not a simple drivetime isochrone but worked up from primary data gathered on how people live, work and spend their leisure time in the various parts of the UK.

Analysing labour markets involves much more than setting out official data on those in work, those seeking work and their respective skills and experience. We were early pioneers in helping to identify various groups for recruitment from 'off labour market'. These include women returners, those nearing or in retirement who we term the 'new grey' labour market and various groups of partially disabled or otherwise blocked individuals finding it difficult to get a start on the local employment ladder. In some locations unlocking these groups has proven extremely successful for clients who had been struggling to reach recruitment targets in fast moving, tight labour markets.

Recently we have been asked to find locations in which large groups of difficult to identify communities can be found. Principal among these has been our investigation of Central East European speaking communities and other migrant labour groups for recruitment purposes.

Official data shows only the first point of arrival of Polish or other Central European workers into the UK for example, but not the current location of many of these individuals. We have developed a unique methodology used by employers to identify hot spots of migrant labour in non-London labour markets that we would be only too happy to discuss with you.

For other clients we have been able to provide mapping and analysis of the likely impacts and costs of re-location, including Key Personnel Analysis and mappings of competitor employers when considering new property options. These, alongside our detailed Location Reviews^©, have provided a high degree of resolution to the location decision making team.