Coronavirus recruitment crises and recruitment industry awards

March 28th, 2020 | Industry News

Whilst companies like Amazon and Ocado are recruiting madly to fulfil orders being placed by panicked consumers, other sectors like travel and hospitality are being hit hard – as are specialist recruitment organisations in those areas. Flybe has already gone out of business, and hotels and cruise lines are predicting the worse crisis for twenty years.

Much recruitment software is also struggling – first to keep pace with the demand for temporary retail and driving staff who are needed to work 24/7 to keep shelves stocked and orders packed and delivered, and second to be the kind of applicant tracking system that UK employers need; able to recognise and track people not just through skills but through travel patterns, so that high risk individuals can be recognised and infection flashpoints can be avoided.

But there’s more to it than that. One data analytics tool is reporting a 47% reduction in job applications worldwide in February 2020 compared to a year earlier. That’s not entirely down to COVID-19, of course: Brexit, Rebellion Extinction and Australia’s wildfires have all had substantial impacts on recruitment locally and generationally, which has added up globally.

However, there’s a problem that SAAS recruitment agencies are overcoming much more easily than their competitors – how to reassure good candidates that (a) they should be looking to change jobs and (b) the recruitment process will be low risk. China, Italy, Spain, Germany, France and Norway are on lockdown. Switzerland and the USA are not far behind. The best recruitment CRM allows agencies not only to stay in close touch with candidates, but also to organise online interviewing and selection processes, so that companies can continue to identify good candidates and get them in place, even if that does mean working from home for the first few weeks or months in a new job.

On a brighter note, entries for the 2020 Global Recruiter Industry Awards close on 31 March and you can enter online! As the organisers say, “these awards… highlight fantastic performance across the recruitment sector”. The awards ceremony is set for 2 July 2020 at Café de Paris in London, and we can all hope that by then, social isolation will be over. If your agency, recruiter, innovation or marketing campaign sparkled over the past year, this is the time to get them some real recognition.