Recruitment is changing. 

Both clients and candidates are behaving very differently. Hiring managers and HR are still working from home, at least some of the time, and getting interviews and feedback is proving challenging. Candidates are risk averse following the pandemic; if they have been Furloughed, or are still on Furlough, they are being loyal to their employer or hoping for a redundancy payment and employers are counter-offering to keep their staff. Recruitment will not return to the status quo of 2019.

On my TEAM ‘travels’ around our meetings and the occasional one-to-one, I’ve heard some great stories of innovation. One TEAM Member who is local generalist recruitment agency on the South coast lost 70% of their business in April 2020 and their biggest client shut down outsourcing recruitment completely. Instead of panicking and focusing on their fairly small market within a 15 mile radius of their town, they subscribed to a tender advisory service and were alerted when local authorities were issuing tenders for their staffing needs.

Their first win was a secretarial opportunity in the Orkneys – some 1,000 miles away which they filled in two days. Since then they have won business across a multitude of councils across the UK, their pipeline is now always busy and they now have the opportunity to really scale their business without the need for constant business development. See tender advisory services such as www.b2bquotetenders.co.uk

Another success I came across was a local generalist in the North West who have morphed to become a mini-RPO business. They now provide full outsourcing services to the SME market and use TEAM Members to support with specialist roles. They recently won 51 new perm jobs – 25 in education and 26 in care to be filled by June. They are super busy and now have total client control rather than their previous multi-agency contingency model.

Two great examples of creative review of current markets and opportunities. Inspiring huh?