Recruitment firm benefits from economic recovery

The group, which is one of the UK's largest recruitment firms, described its performance in the first three months of 2010 as encouraging and said all four of its global operating regions showed improvement on the previous quarter.

While the company predicted a significant improvement in trading this year, it said there was still a great deal of uncertainty attached to business prospects in UK, Europe and North America.

Profits for the group, which generates around 70% of its business outside of the UK, were 97.8 million in the three months to March 31, up 7.9% on the previous quarter and ahead 2.9% on a year earlier.

This reflected stronger than expected trading in the UK, with profits up 9.2% on three months earlier at 28.9 million, helped by a turnaround in the financial services, retail and technology sectors.

Chief executive Steve Ingham said: "The improvement in our performance has been driven largely by greater permanent recruitment activity, as confidence levels have increased leading to a higher rate of job churn, and a stronger than expected performance in the UK."

He added that efforts to diversify the group meant that 40% of its fee earners were in underdeveloped markets.

Mr Ingham said: "We have strong market leading positions in specialist recruitment in Asia and Latin America and are particularly optimistic about our prospects in these regions.

"While we believe the outlook for the UK, continental Europe and North America is less certain, we are now experiencing an improvement in almost all markets."