During the pandemic of 2020, most organisations were forced to enter into a Work-from-Home model where businesses implemented a range of strategies to manage remote workers.

This included programs like Zoom and Microsoft Teams so workers could communicate with each other remotely.  Many businesses that had to recruit during this time had to use remote recruitment and onboarding strategies such as:

• Video Interviewing
• Assessment and Selection Testing
• Remote Onboarding

Some of the major take-aways as workers returned to the office (often working a hybrid mix of partly from home and partly from the office) were that flexible work arrangements were preferable for many workers, for different reasons.

In a recent study, employees at 30 of some of the largest companies in the US were asked if they would rather work from home permanently or get a $30k raise.  3,000 employees were asked this question and the results weren’t even close.  Only employees from 2 companies opted for the pay rise.  Kyun Kim, Co-Founder of anonymous Professional Network Blind[LM1] , stated: “Before Covid, not a lot of people actually experienced working from home so they didn’t realize the benefits,” Kim said. “They had commute plans, plans to send children away to school or child care. Their whole life setting was surrounded by environments that were optimized by going to the office.”

The trend of flexible working practices was greatly accelerated by the pandemic when workers came to understand the benefits.  This, combined with the shortage of skilled workers in many areas means that it’s a candidate’s market.  Areas that normally rely on migrant workers, such as IT and computer programming, are particularly feeling the pinch.

So what does this mean if you are trying to attract talent to your business?

• Understand who your ideal candidates are
• Get clear on your candidates’ priorities and how they prefer to work
• Ensure your business is open to different platforms to support hybrid and remote workers
• Update your HR policies and processes to support the changing world of work
• Speak to your current team about who in their network could be open to new opportunities

If you would like to ensure your HR Polices and processes reflect the new world of work, speak to our HR Consulting team.

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