In Autumn 2020, the phone at Redland Search HQ, forwarded to my mobile at home, had not rung once and then on the 9th November 2020, 2 hours after the Pfizer vaccine had been announced, the phone started ringing with vacancies and hasn’t stopped ringing since. But nothing from a recruitment perspective was going to go back to how it was in February 2020 ever again.
For a while, I’ve been wanting to write a piece on how much our roles as recruiters and headhunters have changed since the initial covid outbreak. The dust had never really settled after the initial impact of the pandemic and what the working environment was truly going to look like going forward was ever-changing. I think now is the time to reflect on how the UK deskbound workforce is now working and what hiring managers need to take into consideration when making their recruitment decisions.
A lot has been written about the demise of towns and how lonely and sedentary remote working can be or how liberating it has been being able to walk the dog at lunchtime or pick up the kids for the first time in years.
I haven’t seen much written (if anything) about how incredibly different it is to build a team now (and I’m talking purely about the roles where, in theory at least, you just need a desk and a laptop/PC to function).
In 2019, despite recruiting for 20 years, I had only one client who was reasonably serious about flexible working. Typically, they were happy for their staff to work from home once a week or in emergencies and I hailed them for their progressive outlook to any candidate that would listen.
That same client in 2020 was the first law firm in the UK to say no one in their office would ever work 5 days a week in the office again. In 2021, due to their surprising successes with working methods through the various lockdowns, they announced that they didn’t mind where any of their staff were based - describing themselves as ‘location agnostic’ when it came to recruiting new members of staff. As an individual case study, this worked magnificently for them. It coincided with the magic circle law firms demanding their staff be back in their London offices at least three times a week and, quite simply, many had left London and couldn’t/didn’t want to go back to a regular City commute. My ‘location agnostic’ client was able to bring dozens of these previously unattainable recruits into the fold with their newfound super flexible location policy.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve seen a phenomenon that has me thinking of a kind of ‘levelling-up’ in regions where staff were deliberately low-paid (yes, deliberately). For what it’s worth, I don’t believe for one second this ‘levelling-up’ has had anything to do with the current government - rather, it is a combination of current technologies being forcefully adopted en masse. I said during the pandemic - once the elderly are all making Zoom calls things will have changed forever!
Whereas 95% of my previous work had been in the West, South West or South East of England, I’m now recruiting at mid to senior management levels right across the UK into professional roles in Finance, BD, Marketing, Tech, HR, Project Management, and Legal in a range of different industry sectors. The big difference is that the jobs remain in the same places, but we are searching for candidates across the UK. Interviews are held via Teams (and no one wants to meet for a coffee any more, but I digress).
Because we focus on our recruitment expertise rather than sector focus, we have quite a broad overview of what different institutions are doing and how they’re working in the new ‘work anywhere’ environment. I’ve written some interesting, not comprehensive, thoughts below and should point out that it’s mostly written from a point of view of recruiting in the South West and South East, but that many of our clients are now using their offices in (for example) Glasgow, Edinburgh, Belfast, Manchester, Birmingham as the cost-centre for local candidates - even if the candidate will largely be home-working and travelling to the HQ in the South more than their home office (so that the company pays their travel costs…)
So here are a few thoughts:
You can find people anywhere now
There are professionals at top tier blue-chips, professional services and financial services in all the major cities of the UK. Organisations increasingly see location as an area they can be flexible with if they struggle to find the right people. Previously, salary was often the first thing to be changed.
There are specialists everywhere in the UK. Well, within reason. There are very few people, for example, with Investment Banking and Traded Investment Product expertise outside of London. Those people exist in other financial centres across Europe and would have been accessible in a previous reality, but let’s not get into THAT argument…
You may have fewer salary affordability issues if you cast the net wide
There are notable examples of cities with a highly educated workforce and very low pay. For these reasons, global professional services, financial services and commercial organisations have moved their operations to these cities - particularly Belfast, Glasgow, and Birmingham, but there are other notable examples. There are candidates in those cities often earning half of their peers’ earnings in Southern England with no difference in skillbase or ability. We’ve seen a number of our West Country law firms and FS clients hire from Magic Circle law firms and bulge bracket banks in Belfast, Glasgow and Birmingham. They have been able to award them significant pay rises without having to break their own budgets. As an example, we had a £70k role at a commercial law firm in Bristol and we were able to give someone earning £50k at a magic circle law firm in Belfast a £20k pay rise rather than having to increase it to £90k to attract someone with the same background from London - neither the Belfast or London candidate would have been viable options in the past.
But if you underpay your staff, they can be poached too
I was recently asked to have a long chat with a professional services firm in Exeter about salary levels for BD and Marketing staff at their firm. It was an interesting discussion. Their salaries had always been competitive for the local Devon market. But now that their staff can double their pay working remotely for a London firm or put £10-15k on their salaries by travelling to Bristol or Bath once a week, what is the new benchmark? I had to tell them that the staff were well paid compared to local firms, but they risk losing all of their staff to higher paying firms further afield. Within weeks they subsequently lost two of their staff to Bristol firms. Firms across the UK will be widening their searches and may well be looking at your staff, whilst armed with a bigger budget. You aren’t just competing with local competitors now and salary surveys are almost impossible to produce!
Firms in higher-paid areas may be pulling all the talent out of lower-paid areas and this is a problem
There may be a levelling up on salaries across the country as top talent in lower-paid areas is finally able to be rewarded in line with the rest of the UK, but where does that leave local employers? There are many companies that can’t compete with their wealthier clients in other parts of the country. Some may say that this has always been the way, but the number of people migrating from one city to another has not been unmanageable for decades. Now, however, candidates can get a job in another city without having to move so it is happening to a much greater extent. I wouldn’t know where to start with this issue, but speaking to people I know at various LEPs, it’s a big issue.
Does Remote Working Destroy Teamwork?
It depends on the management for the most part. I’ve seen teams that are based in every far-flung corner of the UK work incredibly well and build fantastic working relationships. Some of these teams meet once every three or four weeks solely for team-building lunches and nights out. There is definitely a move back to the older working methods with an increased understanding that, maybe, if we want to see our colleagues as whole people then we need to see the whole person!
The Split
As the pandemic moves further into the rearview mirror, it looks like certain types of roles are moving back into the office. Business Developers and Sales Managers or anyone client-facing are spending more and more time in the office. I’m seeing a growing trend in younger employees being required in the office, purely from a managerial and training perspective - face-to-face is just deemed more effective as you can’t book a Teams meeting every time you have a question. As such, their managers need to be in the office too.
I’m not seeing anyone in roles that are full-time in the office yet and still only one in ten interviews is face-to-face rather than virtual. Our senior roles are, for the most part, still happily remote if required. No client we are working with is back to recruiting how they did pre-2020, however.
London Salaries are Higher than Ever
I really thought they would come down due to competition from outside of London, but I was wrong! My cod economics failed again. Staff and potential recruits are being won over by high-paying remote roles with London firms. It’s not a regular phenomenon, but we’ve lost three under-offer candidates this year to London firms who offered salaries that our West Country clients couldn’t compete with.
Are Local People more loyal?
Using only data from our own vacancies over the past 12 months, the radius in which we search for candidates has shrunk. The feeling is that a candidate working (for example) remotely four hours away from Bristol may well pop in once a month, but are they loyal to the cause? They may plug the gap, but how do they fit in with the guys who work in the office when they show their faces? We are still looking further afield than we were pre-pandemic - a commute from (for example) Birmingham to Bristol is deemed acceptable once a week but was never acceptable on a daily basis. The sentiment is very much moving away from 100% remote and towards more regular office time purely from a team-building perspective.
Conclusion
A meandering set of points that have no grounding in mass data results, I’ll admit, but there are still some solid pointers to take!
You can now compromise on location rather than salary. That is happening A LOT and it’s affecting the economies of towns and cities across the UK in a multitude of very complicated ways. You have access to so much more potential for your team in the ‘Work Anywhere’ environment, but how do you develop loyalty? Will they fight for you when the chips are down? There’s always going to be talk about how you motivate, engage, and build relationships and loyalty, but the flipside is a potential increase in happiness, a decrease in burnout, more engaged, concentrated, more skilled and affordable multicultural team. But essentially I just wanted to document how utterly incredible it is that such a huge proportion of the UK’s workforce now works completely differently from how they did three years ago.
Nothing is the same is the same as it was and it’s amazing how quickly it has all changed.