Recruitment Recovery:
Employers Report
Results from our 2020 pulse survey
How is the recruitment industry recovering from the challenges of COVID-19?
How is the recruitment industry recovering from the challenges of COVID-19?
You don’t need us to tell you that the past six months have been unlike anything recruitment has ever experienced.
The pace of change is fast. In-house recruitment teams need to be able to respond just as quickly. As the industry begins to look ahead to the future, we’ve compiled data from our Pulse Survey (April and August 2020) to create this agency recovery report.
Use it to gauge the current state of the industry, benchmark against your peers, shape your strategy and get prepared for what’s coming next.
Looking for the recruitment agency results? View the report here
Exactly as we would expect, 69% of employers have fewer roles to recruit for now, compared to before the pandemic.
20% of employers said that they were still considering redundancies over the next 3 months. With the end of the of the UK's furlough scheme approaching, it's expected that this will contribute to further redundancies.
More optimistically, almost a third (32%) of respondents represent the green shoots of recovery, as they expect to be hiring as normal or scaling up in the coming months.
With massive uncertainty and a sense of desperation for many candidates, we’re seeing very different behaviours.
The candidate attraction landscape has changed. 61% of employers said they were finding it easier (or significantly easier) to attract candidates than before the pandemic.
In fact, recruiters are starting to face the opposite challenge which is that they’re receiving ‘too many’ or ‘irrelevant’ applications.
These changes don’t seem to have affected budgets, with only half having made any changes to their budget throughout the pandemic.
In an open question asking respondents about the changing candidate behaviours they’ve experienced compared to before coronavirus, a few major trends emerged:
The top priorities for recruitment teams have changed significantly during the pandemic. In August 2020, these were the most common priorities:
At a time when many recruiters have significantly fewer roles than normal, it's understandable that getting any remaining live jobs filled would be a priority. A
Although some organisations have introduced a complete hiring freeze across all of their recruitment, many have defaulted to hiring only for the 'essential roles' - positions which are critical to keeping the organisation functioning.
With so much change happening across recruitment, doing business as usual is no longer a viable option. Instead, many employers are taking this opportunity to plan out a new strategy, and re-align themselves to the changing priorities of the business.
Aligning the current workforce with the future needs of the business is particularly relevant in times of change, so it's understandable that workforce planning is such a high priority for so many in-house teams.
Getting this right feeds into many of the other priorities which in house recruiters identified in our survey - such as reducing costs and improving productivity.
Even in a candidate-rich market, having a great candidate experience is (of course) still essential for successfully hiring into organisations.
With many teams having paused some of their usual operations, it's a great opportunity to dedicate time to focus on those projects which often get put on the back-burner.
Survey results show that only half of in house teams have seen their candidate attraction budgets change since the start of coronavirus.
For those who have less financial resource, finding ways to maintain recruitment results with less budget is a high priority. It's time to review costs, assess what's effective and build-in more flexibility.
Adopting new tech solutions has become essential for so many teams in the past few months. Whether it's new tools to support the recruitment process (such as better integrated recruitment websites, video interviewing tools or remote onboarding) or software to help recruitment teams collaborate when working from home.
The outlook for the future is mixed but generally more positive than when we surveyed in April. Recruiters feel more confident about their business and job security than they did back in April.
Only 20% of in house recruitment teams have returned to the office, with the large majority still working from home.
35% of in-house recruiters expected to be back in the office within 6 months - which means almost half of all in-house recruiters are expecting to be working from home right through into spring of next year.
Recruiters are feeling slightly more positive about their wellbeing, compared to the results we collected back in April.
Only 52% of respondents said they felt positive about their wellbeing in April. Now, this is up to 58%.
Organisations have introduced some great initiatives to support their staff throughout the pandemic. Here are some examples respondents shared of how they have been supporting each other:
57% of employers have changed the way they work with traditional job boards in the last 6 months.
The most common changes have been to budgets. Uncertainty and fluctuating demand has forced recruiters who are advertising to look for more flexible ways to manage their job board advertising.
Many job boards have allowed advertisers to be more flexible, through a range of initiatives designed to support budget reductions or re-allocations.
Very few have cancelled completely (less than 10%).
43% haven’t changed the way they work with traditional job boards (e.g. Total Jobs, Reed.co.uk, CV Library).
Of the agencies currently utilising pay per performance boards (e.g. Indeed, Adzuna, Talent.com) not a single respondent said they’d had to cancel budgets - due to the more flexible nature of the contracts.
29% haven’t changed the way they work with tech providers.
From those who have, 29% have reduced their budgets and only 2% have cancelled any contracts.
16% have increased their budgets or started new contracts, highlighting how many are beginning to adopt new solutions in response to challenges emerging around new ways of working.
The focus has shifted. As we start planning for recovery and future growth, here are some of the biggest concerns which respondents identified:
Adapting to new ways of working (49%)
Managing too many applications (46%)
Being able to quickly respond to future trends and changes (39%)
Generating results with less budget or internal resource (37%)
