City employers spurn the traditional summer lull as marketing vacancies surge 19%

• Number of marketing jobs in the City jumps 19% in July compared with the same time last year
• Employers struggle to secure top talent as candidates fall 12% year-on-year
• Summer skills shortage developing with 1.4 roles per candidate

City employers have flouted the usual summer lull in the jobs market as they look to attract new business in light of the continued economic recovery, with the number of marketing vacancies rising 19% in July compared to the same time last year.

The results of the Robert Walters City Jobs Index, which tracks the number of jobs available and candidates seeking jobs in the City of London month-by-month, also show that in July the number of candidates seeking marketing jobs fell by 12% compared to last year.

This unseasonal increase in vacancies has coincided with the drop in the number of candidates year-on-year, combining to leave employers in a challenging position to secure top talent with a ratio of 1.4 jobs per candidate.

Ben Stevenson, Associate Director, Marketing comments:
“While we are used to seeing the number of vacancies and candidates decline during the summer months, this year has, at least partly, defied the trend.

Sky Media has agreed a new sponsorship deal with Investec for the hit rugby series, School of Hard Knocks on Sky Sports

The partnership launches on Saturday 15^th August when the eighth series of the popular Rugby show returns to Sky Sports 1, following live coverage of England v France. Hosted by Will Greenwood and Scott Quinnell, School of Hard Knocks follows the two former Internationals train and mentor a group of unemployed young men.

Will and Scott recruit the participants themselves, inviting them to build a Rugby team and take part in a course aimed at improving fitness, social development and life skills, with the end goal of getting a job. The programme helps participants powerfully address issues of physical health, emotional wellbeing, anti-social behaviour, crime and citizenship. Over the past six years they have recruited and worked with around 200 unemployed men.

As part of the deal Investec will create bespoke Rugby themed credits that will play out around the broadcast and digital assets within the Rugby Union section of skysports.com and the Sky Sports App.

Leading Content Intelligence platform, idio, announces a new addition to its product offering, the Industry Dashboard

This tackles a common problem facing content marketers; keeping track of what their competitors are writing about and finding opportunities to get ahead of current market discussions.

As Content Marketing practices in businesses take strides forward in both quality and quantity of content being produced, they face a growing challenge to cut through to customers.

Recent research by the Content Marketing Institute has shown that 86% of both B2B and B2C marketers that use content marketing, are expecting to spend more on it over the remainder of the year. As businesses vie for a slice of prospects’ attention through well-crafted pieces of topical content, standing out in the marketplace – even getting ahead of it – has become an increasingly difficult feat.

By leveraging idio’s unique Industry Dashboard, businesses will be able to compare their content with an endless list of competitors’ efforts, contrasting their focus on specific topics within their content strategies, and discover content gaps and under-explored topics they have opportunity to develop.

Better content strategy, personalized content delivery, and sales intelligence

idio’s Content Intelligence platform resolves the challenge of content relevancy for major B2B brands, by understanding the interests and intent of every prospect and customer based on their content consumption. This deep and predictive understanding drives better content strategy, personalized content delivery, and sales intelligence.

While it has previously been possible to provide rich insight into the content volume, topic variety, and topic popularity within a client’s content marketing strategy, idio can now concurrently process the same data for any number of other companies, creating a valuable competitive data set which would otherwise take considerable time to compile. With topic data being analysed automatically, and in real-time, the dashboard tackles the issue of finding time to  ‘keep up’ with the wider marketplace of content, and removes the pain of one’s own internal content audit.