Going into month 2 of Covid-19 lock-down over here and things are getting no clearer with regards to exactly what we are going to drop back into once lock-down measures start relaxing.

Business levels on recruitment/hiring are beyond rock bottom, BUT there are businesses out there still doing some recruiting. This is mostly for Contractors due to uncertainty of the future and also that Contractors tend to need minimal onboarding and have all their own equipment and good home office set ups already.

Any permanent hiring that is going on has the added angle that hardly any candidates will consider a job move from where they are working currently (understandable). Most businesses that already had (or have now quickly set up) a remote hiring/onboarding process are getting on BAU, but these are few and far between.

We have started seeing a few Customers in the US open up on hiring freezes last week (we sense the US is itching to get its economy back). Lots of our Customers/Network are saying they are past the ‘caught like rabbits in headlights’ frozen moment that most of us experienced in mid-March, and now all working affectively from new locations (mostly home) are beginning to think about how they can resume getting on with projects. Quite a few large Corporations we deal with are saying they want to begin pipelining new talent/hires in May/June, with a view to doing final face to face interviews sometime in June (when they can all being well) and having a load of people start on July 1^st.

I hope business levels are holding up for all our clients, and that you have your valued employees safely working from wherever possible and being affective.

Let’s see what the next few weeks has in store for us all. Fingers crossed for us all.

Steve Morrisey