Recruiters can help kick-start a people-powered recovery

This article was originally written as the special feature in the February 2021 edition of Report on Jobs.

There is a lot of underlying strength in the UK’s jobs market, even in tough times such as these. The past year has been one of the most difficult in living memory – but there is also opportunity as we come out the other side of the pandemic. And with the UK’s recruitment experts at their side, businesses will be able to bounce strongly in 2021. 

Certainly, the rising tide of Coronavirus and the end of the Brexit transition period have had a negative effect on employers’ outlook. Their confidence in the prospects of the UK economy deteriorated steadily through the final months of 2020, reaching a net level of -52 in the three months to December.

We also know that many have had to make difficult decisions about their workforce since the pandemic hit the UK. Report on Jobs shows that staff availability has been rising since the spring. In our survey of employers, three in ten (28%) said that they had made redundancies in the year to October-December 2020, while two in five (39%) had reduced workers’ hours. In many cases, businesses would have gone under without these measures.

But behind these difficulties, there is underlying confidence and pent-up demand waiting to emerge. Since the summer, an increasing proportion of employers have been expecting to hire new permanent staff both in the short and medium term. For the most part, the state of the economy and the resurgence of COVID-19 mean that those plans have been delayed until the outlook begins to look more stable – but there are signs that this could change soon. Employers’ confidence levels about hiring and investing in their own business rose in the final quarter of 2020 to net: +5. As long as the current lockdown measures succeed in suppressing the virus, we could begin to see more growth in permanent hiring over the coming months.

The UK’s recruitment industry is ready to help kick-start this recovery. Recruiters have already been essential to keeping the economy going throughout the pandemic – placing nurses, doctors and care workers in vital positions to care for the sick and vulnerable; finding drivers and warehousing staff to help keep supermarket shelves stocked; and providing valuable advice and support to their client businesses.

That expertise has been and will be even more valuable because of the labour market shifts that COVID-19 has accelerated. Temporary agency workers have been in growing demand because of the uncertainty around the outlook, and that will continue to happen as companies use flexible labour to recover from the crisis. The shift to remote working also provides interesting new opportunities for both workers and businesses to fill jobs while living further away from the office. Recruiters can play a central role in helping everyone to adapt to this new world of work.

It’s vital to put people at the heart of the recovery this year – and the recruitment industry has the skills and expertise to make that happen.