Robindro Ullah, CEO at Trendence Institut will discuss the The Impact of a Global Pandemic on Peoples Job Mindsets on Wednesday, November 10 from 17:00 pm to 17:20 pm at Cybersecurity Leadership Summit 2021.
To give you a sneak preview of what to expect, we asked Robindro some questions about his presentation.
Why has recruitment today never been so easy and hard at the same time?
This is a very good question, because on the one hand, we clearly see in our data, for example, that direct search or active sourcing was less used by companies, which is obviously because they have less job openings to fill. And, for example, also everything around the recruitment process was also easier to access, like video calls or virtual onboarding, and all that stuff. It didn't take so much time to do things like that, where in the past you had to travel to an employer to do an interview or a case study or something. Everything went online. So, talent was more accessible than before. On the other hand, the requirements of talent increased, like more people were looking for secure jobs or something we called job security. And another thing, for example, which was very prominent in Germany, was that more and more talents were looking for essential jobs, or at least they wanted to work in an essential environment. Like for example, we didn't ask the question before the pandemic, but during the past year, it was like every second person said that if they change or if they switch jobs, they will definitely look especially for essential jobs or jobs in an essential field.
How has the pandemic changed people's mindset about jobs in the last 1.5 years?
This is a difficult question. With our surveys and the data we are gathering we tried to look into the mindsets of people to get a clear picture of what they are thinking now. Obviously, as I said before, we have a shift in the direction of essential jobs or essential fields. So, till now, we are not 100 percent clear whether this is a shift which is based on more job security, because people think that an essential job is more secure, or is it because they thought about their life and the things they are doing and whether it is really something which matters, or is it essential for the society? And so, this could also be a reason why there's a shift in the direction of essential. In Germany especially, we also had, for example, a shift in the direction of government jobs or jobs in the public sector. This is also something which could be based on more job security, as well as on a shift in the mindset. In general, we can see that work/life balance or as we call it sometimes also work/life blending got more and more important during the pandemic and the focus on the family itself.
What distinguishes IT expert recruitment from the search of other professional fields?
This is a nice question, and a lot of our customers ask us how to approach IT experts, and is this completely different to all other searches they do or all other jobs that they have to fill? If you look at it from a more modern way of recruitment, you have to admit that every target group you are trying to access, you have to access individually. So, from this point of view of modern recruitment, IT experts, of course, they have to be approached individually, but it's not different from other target groups, because nowadays you have to approach every target group in a very individual way. What especially in the field of IT is harder or more difficult is the fact that they are approached a lot, like they get offers all the time, every day. So, you have to be more creative in comparison to other target groups, and you have to find other ways to approach them.
The highways to these talents, they are frequent. A lot of companies use those ways like LinkedIn or in in the German-speaking area, Xing. So, you have to be more creative and think about other ways to approach this talent. And of course, you have to consider the requirements they have. For example, in our data, we can clearly see that remote work has a different status or it has a different impact on this target group than on others. They have higher requirements on the topic of remote work. For example, companies who have rules like you can work two days a week from home, also after our crisis. So, in future, this is something which would not be enough for IT experts. Because IT experts, in general say at least it should be 3.5 days a week I can use remote work and not just two days.
Could you give us a sneak peek into your Keynote: “The impact of a global pandemic on people’s job mindsets”?
In my keynote, I want to present to you some of the data we collected during the last one and half years, what we did in the very beginning of this pandemic was that we started a monthly survey in Germany. And from this data, we got a lot of insights I want to present to you. Especially those insights which give a little bit of insight into the mindsets of the people. And for example, one insight I was very - not shocked, but surprised about, was the fact that, for example, the social media usage in terms of career and job search changed a little bit.
Before we had the big players who got a lot of traffic. And now more and more small players get more traffic, like very small networks in terms of career and job topics like TikTok, for example, came up in the professional area, which I've never seen before. TikTok is on the market from I think from 2015 on, or 2017 in the Western world too. So a lot changed due to the pandemic. And we have good reason to believe that. for example, one of the reasons is that people have more time. They were able to spend more time thinking about which social networks fit their needs best.