Is now a good time to recruit?
It is difficult for businesses to know what to do in such an unprecedented time as this. As it looked like the country was starting to return to some normality, cases drastically increased day on day and tougher restrictions have been placed across the nation, with some areas going back into local lockdown. We’ve seen a huge contrast, with companies dealing in select industries that have profited over the pandemic on big recruitment drives as they aim to keep up with the demand of the product or service. Whereas many others have suffered greatly. With everything that has been going on and so much uncertainty around, the immediate reaction is to avoid all unnecessary costs with businesses cutting costs and regrettably leading to staff redundancies or new hires being postponed or cancelled altogether.
However, is stopping all your recruitment the right thing for your business? It’s a very subjective question and it won’t be the same for all businesses, but if your business is in a position where it can afford to take the hit of hiring new staff, should it?
If we look at before the Coronavirus, the employment market was very competitive, particularly in Oxfordshire where unemployment was low and retention of the best talent was generally pretty high. It was very much a candidate-driven market and had been for some years. But now, with such a low number of jobs being advertised and the furlough scheme ending at the end of this month, experts forecast huge number of redundancies will follow. At MP Recruitment, we expect this will flip the market on its head and now the market will very much be led by the employers and the vacancies that are being advertised.
With this being said, this could be the perfect time for a business to get an edge over their competitors by hiring quality talent that they might not have been able to realistically access beforehand. There may never be a better time for your business to get a perfect hire!
Of course, hiring anybody at this time will have an element of a financial risk, so this is not a hard and fast rule for every company who has halted their recruitment until now. More than ever it’s a balance of risk and reward when making a new hire, but if you believe that your business is in a place where it could hire, maybe this is your opportunity to get ahead of the competition!
