The Impact of Covid-19 on the Recruitment Industry
Covid-19 and the Recruitment Industry
In 2019, the recruitment industry in the UK reached a turnover of £38.9 billion. Adapting and maintaining growth despite the uncertainty surrounding Brexit and in the 3 months up to February 2020, the employment rate reached a record 76.6%. Then Covid-19 happened, leaving a huge impact across the world economy but not a uniform one. Whilst some industries have managed to continue relatively unscathed, the majority have had to withstand devastating blows to the way they work, the recruitment industry included. Early statistics show that the industry has already experienced one of the biggest declines since the 2009 global recession.
The industry has been flipped on its head from growth to decline and the UK’s unemployment rates ever increasing, the job market has swiftly moved from its buoyant state to an estimated job vacancy reduction of more than 50% since the start of the first national lockdown. April to June saw a record low number of vacancies, 343,000, followed by an increase of 144,000 for July to September but vacancy levels are still 332,000 (40.5%) below that of last year.
The impact of the pandemic is far from finished on the UK economy, redundancies continue to rise and vacancies continue to vanish, meanwhile the candidate pool is growing ever larger and the recruitment industry finds itself once again needing to adapt.
With this being the case, how can recruitment companies keep up and ensure that they are forwarding the best possible candidates to their clients?
The Recruitment Industry's Way Forward
All that said, it isn’t all doom and gloom and that’s especially true for recruitment. Time and time again the industry has proven it is able to adapt and now more than ever, it will be crucial to do so. With recruiters having a very important role to play in the renaissance of the world, post COVID-19.
Unemployment rates are predicted to reach a high of 6.8% in 2021, almost double that of earlier in the year pre covid and whilst this continues to be a problem the recruitment industry can help in a few different ways. Firstly, helping job searchers and employers to adapt to new technologies that will be far more commonly used in the recruitment process, i.e. video interviews, online testing and virtual onboarding. Secondly, helping their clients to find the best possible candidates in a world where there are more candidates available than ever before.
The job market has done a complete 180, previously where companies may have struggled to recruit and roles were going unfilled, now they are being overwhelmed with applications from professionals who are desperate for work. Some roles are attracting as high as 3000 applicants, so now more than ever it has become important that recruiters have good screening tools to ensure they are able to find the best possible candidate for any role.
With most of the world having turned to various methods of video conferencing to enable the much needed human interaction, recruitment is no different. In the weeks and months gone by there has been a steep rise in the use of video interviewing, as the virus continues to pose problems in trying to conduct them face to face. Whilst video interviewing is a good substitute for that of one in person, that in itself presents its own challenges. With candidates enjoying this new world, allowing them to be even more prepared and have notes nearby ready to answer the interviewers questions once again, recruiters find themselves trying to decipher which of the many candidates is best – can become even more difficult than in normal circumstances.
Psychometric testing offers not only a fair way of screening candidates, but also an efficient one. With the sheer volumes of applicants most vacancies are seeing, there is an ever growing need to use these scientific means to decipher who could be the best possible candidate. Using psychometrics assessments to screen candidates will ensure that you retain the most amount of talent throughout your recruitment process, allowing you to forward the highest performing candidates into your final selection process. Moving to final selection, psychometrics can provide valuable insight to accompany a structured interview process, aiding those recruitment decisions in the fairest way possible.
At Inpsyght Consultancy we are committed to helping organisations to achieve Zero Talent Waste, as this is something we are passionate about. We want everyone in the job market to get a fair chance of succeeding. To us, it means to get the right candidate for the right position with no focus on the demographics. We simply want to identify candidates who have the highest potential, lowest risks and best cultural fit. To achieve it we must assess candidates as early as possible by applying psychometrics – but in order to be able to do so, it must be affordable.We provide access to a state-of-the-art testing platform, Ascend, which contains all our robust and validated psychometric assessments. We offer a completely customisable suite of assessments that can help support all your recruitment needs and ensures the best evaluation of all candidate’s performance, risk and culture-fit
To read more about Zero Talent Waste and why we believe it is important head over to our previous blog:
https://www.inpsyght.co.uk/zero-talent-waste/
To learn more about the psychometric tests we provide, use the following link: https://www.inpsyght.co.uk/solutions/
Follow Inpsyght Consultancy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/inpsyght-consultancy-ltd