12 Apr 2023
It feels as if the UK is coming to a halt - many industries have stopped trading: pubs, restaurants, gyms, theatres, and lots of people are already out of work, or in a massively vulnerable position because of coronavirus.
So, what's happening with recruitment? Is anyone recruiting during the pandemic?
The short answer - yes!
Clearly those industries affected by the coronavirus will have stopped all hiring activity. But, look at where other industries are thriving because of the behaviours of the general UK population.
Stuck at home for the most part, people are online: shopping, gaming, gambling, sorting out their much ignored admin or researching how to handle home-schooling for the kids. Online retailers and grocers had a huge financial upturn as more and more people used them to buy what they needed, choosing not to venture out due to the public health situation. If they are heading out, they are shopping for groceries and essentials to keep stocked up for the foreseeable future.
Industry leaders know every business will be affected somehow by this virus, many in a bad way, but some in a good way, financially at least. Those leaders know life will return to normal at some point.
People will still plan for retirement, decide to move elsewhere, and make decisions to move on from their employers. So, plans for recruitment still have to be in place.
There are still hundreds of thousands of jobs vacant in the UK. Much of this was as a result of Brexit, with the exit from the European Union seeing many of the healthcare workers especially but also other workers from many different sectors returning home to mainland Europe and leaving skills gaps that are currently proving impossible to fill. Many, as you would expect, can't be filled right now because a sector has ground to a halt, but many others can and will be recruited to.
Those employers who can't appoint just yet are holding off on giving start dates but making offers nonetheless. Some employers are starting people in their roles because contractually they feel they must, but are not giving the employees any work because of the situation caused by coronavirus. So, for some newly employed people, they are sitting at home and are unable to actually do any work as they haven’t been assigned any but technically have a new job that they have just been appointed to.
But, there are employers with vacant roles who are advertising, interviewing and appointing people to start work, and for the most part, they're doing it remotely. Technology nowadays allows interviews to take place by video, and it works! OK, you can't shake hands at the start or end of it, but the conversation can take place, eye contact can be made, skills can be assessed and people are still being offered new jobs. Video interviews are actually much better for some people than in-person interviews. It can be much more pleasant and less exhausting doing interviews from the comfort of your own home than having to drive or take public transport to reach the office premises and be shown into an intimidating room before being asked questions.
So, How Can They Start Work?
Sensible employers who have been meticulously planning have now reached the stage where new recruits can start adding value. They can be onboarded remotely if necessary - video tools such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams are playing a vital role in this, and people are feeling positive about the experience. And then of course there are some employers who have enough measures in place to bring people into a workplace safely from time to time.
Recruitment, onboarding and training is happening in office-based roles, customer service type call-centre roles, finance, admin and all other sorts of jobs where employers have the technology to onboard and train their staff remotely, and allow them to be effective employees despite the virus.
Communication tools are playing a vital part in ensuring new starts feel part of the team, and feel valued by their employer, and employers are starting to find that fixing someone to a desk, in an office, isn't as necessary as they had thought!
Remote working is proving to be a pretty resilient way of working and this has been the first real test it has had “in the wild”, if you like. There have previously been some employers who have embraced it but nothing like the numbers that have been exposed to remote working during the pandemic.
What many managers are finding is that their employees are actually even more productive when they are working from home, and this has been a bit of a surprise for many of them who had assumed productivity would suffer.
There had been somewhat of an assumption that when workers were at home amongst their familiar things that their commitment to actually getting work done would waver but the opposite now seems to be true.
There are many jobs out there to be had and you shouldn’t let the fact that there is a pandemic put you off applying for them. At some point, things will go back to a more normal version of the world and it will be possible to work from the office again.
The question remains though, will the people who have been perfectly comfortable working from home be happy to go back to working in an office? It will feel like giving up a freedom that they have had, in order to once more be shackled to the office. Many workers are not missing the commute in the slightest and there could be disputes about working conditions once Covid-19 is in the rear view mirror.
So, if you're feeling despondent about starting a new career search, then don't. There are opportunities, work still needs to happen and jobs still need to be done! Have a look online to see what's around for you - we have over 100,000 jobs listed across the UK and in all sectors. There's no harm in looking! Click here to see all jobs at OurBob.com
