Articles Month: June 2020

Covid 19 is throwing the global economy into a deep recession. That much is obvious. What is less clear is when the recovery starts and how long it will take.

From an individual business perspective the beginning of your revenue recovery will depend on what industry you are a part of, or supply to, but reading between the lines many economic forecasters are expecting the worst for the remainder of 2020 with an equally sharp recovery starting in 2021.

So if your business starts to see green shoots towards the end of this year or early next, what can you expect when you look to strengthen your team? Will recruitment be easy or hard given the wider economic circumstances?

The answer is a bit of both.

Hiring people in what was, pre-Covid, a specialist, candidate short market may become easier because most industries will see some redundancies.

Furlough schemes in Europe are expected to taper off during Q3 leaving employers to pick up at least a portion of their furloughed employees wages or start making redundancies. It feels inevitable that a number of skilled, experienced workers will be forced into the job market.

Naturally, they become active job seekers, sending their CV directly to advertised positions and registering with sector specific recruitment agents. In short, the availability of previously hard to find skill sets and specific sector experience improves considerably.

In addition, the candidate’s negotiation position on salary is a lot weaker. Whilst gainfully employed pre-crisis they would only move for a decent increment in remuneration. Now, they are more than likely to be happy with parity with their last salary, making them cheaper on your payroll.

In summary, finding candidates is easier and they cost less to hire.

However, and this is the uncomfortable bit, companies often use a period of cost cutting to jettison their weakest performers. Sure, it’s the position that gets made redundant not the individual but, off the record, many senior decision makers ensure their best people get retained whilst below average head for the exit.

This begs the question: Are the newly available and relatively inexpensive candidates really the people you want to hire?

Naturally, there will be some high performers who are merely a victim of circumstance and they are the hidden gems if you are hiring, but buyer beware of every CV that ends up in your inbox. And prepare yourself, if past recessions are anything to go by, there will be an awful lot of applicants with very little relevant experience swamping your inbox or overwhelming your recruitment team.

So let’s say you pick up a couple of excellent new employees from the huge flux in the employment market but you still have positions to fill. You decide to contact directly, or via a recruiter, potential candidates working in your competitors.

This is where you can expect it to be even tougher than pre-Covid hiring. Why?

From personal experience of approaching hundreds of candidates, I know you will get a much higher incidence of one of these two reactions.

“My current company has been loyal to me through a very difficult period, I feel I owe them that loyalty back”

or…

“The economy still looks uncertain at the moment and I don’t want to take the risk of moving jobs”

No matter how attractive your company, job or salary is, these are very difficult objections to overcome.

So how do you react? The best way to deal with this is three-fold.

Firstly, ensure whoever is doing your recruiting (internally or third party) is a fantastic ambassador for your company and can brilliantly convey your job proposition to a prospective candidate thus maximising the chances of them getting interested and wanting to take it further.

Secondly, make sure the list of candidate targets is long enough to give you a strong chance of finding those who are willing to take the risk of a job move. Yes, it’s a numbers game and a real test of thoroughness.

Finally, start pipelining candidates before you are ready to hire. In other words, reach out to candidates who look like they could be a fit for your organisation and start a dialogue. Be transparent about when you are hoping to hire and view this as investing in a relationship via regular, meaningful contact.

In an economy as volatile as this, individuals’ circumstances and attitude towards a job move can change very quickly in your favour. If you have established contact and credibility with them you are already ahead of your competitors in your pursuit of the best possible talent.

Simon Edbury

simon@edburydaley.com

 

We offer some valuable insights into how recruitment actually works in a market like the one we are about to experience as the global economy gets back on its feet.

We are all hearing about how the Covid pandemic is changing the world as we know it and it’s pretty clear that it’s going to affect employment markets, hiring trends, and potentially recruitment activity but do you actually understand what this means for the mechanics of the job market?  If you don’t then how will you understand the changes and take advantage of them for your organisation? For many, making the assumption that you will automatically have lots of good candidates applying for your vacancies who will be willing to accept reduced salaries is a misconception.  It’s also a dangerously floored strategy.

Now for many years recruitment in these markets has been what we recruiters call “candidate-driven”. i.e. there is a shortage of specialist skills so those that offer them are often in high demand when they come to the market, and this puts proven candidates in a strong position when it comes to selecting who they work for. It also strengthens their hand when negotiating salary.

Recruiters like us spend a lot of time nurturing our relationships with these people so they decide to consider moving roles we are the first to know and can give our clients the first opportunity to hire them – this is a fundamental benefit of our Talent Intelligence offering.   Specialist recruiters also spend a lot of time actively headhunting these people for open roles in our clients in order to find talent to fuel their headcount growth.

A good example of this is software sales and presales people who truly understand the value proposition of procurement solutions to the client community.  This has come about because the market has grown quicker than the talent pool can keep pace with and is one reason why such people command very high basic salaries – the simple demand/supply equation.

One major impact of Covid is that many organizations are reducing headcount or at least taking their foot off the growth pedal which reduces demand.  So it’s quite likely that we could move to a “client-driven” market.   This appears to be great news if you are a hiring manager from a growing software company, but is it all good news?

If you look at why people are coming into the job market in the current climate, they fit into three main categories:

Made redundant – employers have had to cut costs drastically to survive and have to lose people quickly.  These people have largely been unfortunate and will include both top and underperformers as well as those in between. The trick is knowing which of those categories they fall into – it’s our job to know this and/or find out for our clients.

Fearful of employers long term stability – the financial implications of Covid are massive with many companies seeing a drastic reduction in sales in recent months.  The impact of this is clear, especially to those close enough to the leadership team to have an insight into decision making.  There are some excellent people who have been retained by their employers because they are such strong performers that are keeping a close eye on the job market in case there is a better option available to them.  People who fall into this category often reach out to recruiters like us to let us know they are potentially in the job market.  We’ve probably tried to headhunt them for roles in the past or helped them move jobs at some stage.  This is where our specialist market expertise enables us to be talent magnets and get access to people that others can’t.

Unhappy with decisions made at the top of the organisation in the current crisis – business leaders have had to make some tough decisions recently.  Often these decisions are questioned by people in the organisation.  Time will tell who calls it right and wrong but frustration with those above you in the management structure has always been a key driver in people wanting to move jobs.  The net result is the same as above – they come to people like us that they know and trust to keep an eye on the market for them.

So what does all this mean to you as a hiring manager?

Do you use valuable time and resources to sort through the huge numbers of job applicants to try to find the right hires and hope you get it right?  The benefits are that you will make use of your internal recruitment/talent attraction/HR team and save on recruitment fees in the process.

However, it’s likely that you will miss out on that specialist market insight and background information that will help you hire the top performers I refer to above.

So do you engage a specialist to guide you through it and increase your chances of  success because:

We save you time and resources and therefore money.

We put proven high-quality performers in front of you quickly.

We don’t waste your time with unsuitable candidates who may be unqualified, lacking relevant experience or have patchy track records of performance.

If you want to read a brief summary of how we are able to do exactly this for our clients, you can read about our Talent Intelligence approach here.

If you want to discuss how we can help you with these particular challenges please contact me via andrew@edburydaley.com or +44 7711 715258.

Andrew Daley

Director – Procurement & Supply Chain Technology