A survey conducted jointly by the UK's Chartered Institute of Personnel Development and Adecco indicates that hiring sentiment in the UK may be recovering from 2020's surge in unemployment rates. Out of 2,000 companies surveyed across multiple sectors, 56 percent responded that they plan to hire in the first quarter of this year, the highest since the pandemic began.

At the same time, only 20 percent indicated that they are planning redundancies, down from 30 percent in the last quarter.

Calling the findings the “first signs of positive employment prospects that we've seen in a year," Gerwin Davies, Public Policy Advisor at the CIPD, said that unemployment may be close to peak and might even be lower than projected, which he attributed partly to the fall in the number of foreign workers post-Brexit and given the continued pandemic border closures.

However, the survey results also showed that the worst hit sectors—hospitality and retail among others—have still not rebounded. The companies most likely to hire are in sectors that either continued to do well during the pandemic, or that are recovering quickly: healthcare, finance and insurance, education, and ICT. In contrast, only 36 percent of companies in hospitality indicated that they are planning to hire.