Andres – Recruitment Consultant
First of all I know I’m lucky, I still have a job in an industry that has seen mass redundancies. Some of our competitors appeared to panic fire on day one of the lockdown and I saw a lot of my peers go the way of the dodo through no fault of their own.
The changes to recruitment have been swift, wholly unexpected and at times awkward to react to.
Traditionally I’d have been spending March and onwards targeting the manufacturing sector with a bias on engineering. Where I live that is predominantly in the aerospace sector so of course that plan went out the window early doors. Ordinarily there are side industries to fall back on. Often you can sneak in the odd Chef or Hotel Manager somewhere in North Devon but again that was an industry put on indefinite hiatus.
The good news is that as a small team we’ve been able to roll with the various economic punches and adapt our focus to wherever business could be snouted out in the short term. This meant that I got stuck into temp roles (something I’d actively avoided in the past) and learned a significant amount about the processes and legalities involved therein. It meant diving well outside of my comfort zone and speaking to companies I’d always assumed I had no business talking to in the past.
What I found (and I guess I should always have known) is that recruitment in all industries, while nuanced, is essentially the same. Find a great product, understand where they fit into the marketplace and then introduce them to companies desirous of their skills and attributes. Whether it be a Network engineer or a Grounds keeper the principles are the same.
Moving forward and into whatever normal may look like in 2021 I hope I remember these lessons and how we, each of us have essentially shrugged off the conventions of what seems like a lifetime ago and take confidence from the fact that despite all that has been thrown at us as a business, we stood together from day one, created a plan based on the realisation that a fortnight from now could look very different and kept smiling.
I genuinely hope others in the industry have been as fortunate and can offer as incentive that we all keep pushing forward in the knowledge that there is business out there. It just may come from somewhere we haven’t ventured to look before.
