Two months in and a day trip with the family yesterday and my head is feeling refreshed and ready for work. Today, let’s take a look at our recruitment landscape and the impact of Coronavirus on businesses.
There is no doubt that the rapid arrival of Covid-19 has caused a major disruption to the UK’s employment market, in only February we recorded a record employment rate for the 3 months prior of 76.6% (Office for National Statistics).
It would be fair to say that currently the majority of employers are focused entirely on job retention and have put a temporary freeze on hiring new talent, for the first time in years, we will see an ever-growing candidate pool.
Of course, not every industry sector has put a pause on recruitment – logistics, FMCG and social work are actively hiring according to the IES Report. Since the shift to home-working the hardware and networking industry has also reported an increase and today Prince Charles has joined the campaign to call on ‘pickers who are stickers’ from our furloughed and unemployed workforce to help harvest Britain’s fruit and vegetables.
How do we expect this will impact us moving forward? As lockdown eases, as businesses become used to the new ways of working and start to take the small steps to getting back to new-normal, we will see an overall desire to drive the UK’s economic recovery. Businesses may be tempted to hire temporary and contract workers with extensive transferable skills and candidates in turn may be more flexible in respect to the placements they consider.
With extensive experience of recruiting in both candidate and client driven markets, we are able to draw on this to support both our clients and candidates. Whether you are concerned about your future career prospects or need to thrash out your workforce plans, please do drop us an email and we would be extremely happy to help, info@121york.co.uk.
This is most certainly a strange new world of work.