In our final webinar of 2020, with our candidate community, we shared our knowledge on what we see happening with the current job market and how this will impact them in the workplace or job search. We conducted a thorough market review with our clients (with a fantastic response rate) and received the latest information for them on hiring protocols and plans for 2021, changes to remuneration, and what they can do to get yourself as prepared as possible.
This was a really insightful webinar, and we received some fantastic feedback from our listeners, so we thought we would share it with our wider audience.
Before we head into information we received from our wonderful clients, here is a brief overview of what we have been seeing in the job market over the past few months:
We are really pleased to share that business confidence is definitely on the rise. When lockdown 2.0 was implemented we were prepared to see business begin to slow, however, we were pleased to see that actually this didn’t happen as much as we had anticipated. We noticed new roles from other industries coming in; roles from head of retail offices and property businesses which perhaps didn’t follow the recent trend of healthcare, tech and private equity, for example. We also noticed an increase in junior roles coming back in which had sadly disappeared between April to October this year.
As you may be aware already, Bain and Gray are not industry specific which meant our market review with our clients enabled us to get a really broad idea of the market as a whole rather than just a specific sector. We heard from our clients in industries such as consultancy, property, tech, UHNW, financial services, private households, construction, legal and more - so we got some really fantastic and insightful information of the market.
Here are a few of the many topics we covered and the feedback we received:
Working from home:
We wanted to establish who is back in the offices, who will be going back to the offices or will there be a lot more working from home going forward. It was clear to see that actually the majority of our clients are back in the office already (even with limited movement in Tier 3), 12% are going back in Q2 and 25% said they were unsure. Really interestingly, 70% of our clients said that they will be changing their working style and will offer a lot more Flexi-working and working from home opportunities in 2021, where the further 30% said they would not be changing their working style at all.
Do you have any new positions planned due to business growth?
We were interested to see if any of our clients had benefited from this year and it was incredibly comforting to hear that 43% are planning to grow in 2021. A very small % are currently undergoing a hiring freeze and really interestingly, a consultancy client said that they would only be hiring virtual assistants moving forward.
Hiring protocols for 2021:
Overwhelmingly our clients said they will be staying pretty much the same but taking some learnings that they have experienced from this year and using that to enhance their current process.
Many said that first round interviews on video calls will continue moving forward. At Bain and Gray, we have found that what used to be a 3-4 round interview process, clients are now wanting to add in a few more layers and our now wanting around 6-7 rounds. This would obviously mean that the hiring process will take a little bit longer than normal.
We also noticed that clients have been able to spend more time looking at the structure of their roles, during this year. It’s clear that they are looking at diversity, flexibility, part-time, freelance, temporary, contracted etc, which therefore means there is a wider scope of potential candidates for roles.
A new thing we noticed from this market review was that clients are now looking for (as a requirement) candidates to be a little more tech savvy!
We really hope this short overview of the webinar was insightful and helpful to you. As a conclusion, we are definitely beginning to see a positive rise in companies hiring support staff and we hope 2021 will be even better.
