With a record fall in available jobs and rise in unemployment, there's a lot of uncertainty in the job market, especially for those on furlough or that have recently been made redundant.
To provide some insight, we're asking our clients how they're planning for the uncertainty of the next few months and how they plan to emerge from this pandemic stronger and more united than ever.
This week we've been speaking to Alicia Ariffin, Head of People and Culture at SteelEye, who oversees hiring across all territories. SteelEye are a compliance technology and data analytics solutions provider based in London. Their award-winning platform helps firms harness the power of their financial and regulatory data to gain new insights, reduce costs and comply smarter.
Here's how SteelEye are preparing for the uncertainty over the next 6 months from a staffing perspective:
" As we slowly start to formulate our plans for a phased return to the SteelEye office, there have been many factors that we have had to take into serious consideration.
First and foremost, the health and wellbeing of our employees is our top priority, from both a physical and mental health perspective. Everyone’s circumstances and mindsets when it comes to Covid-19 is naturally going to differ; some people are eager to return to the office as it may provide them with a sense of normality and routine, whilst others may prefer to continue working from home, and this could be due to a myriad of factors such as childcare issues, concern over health and safety, and so on. It’s important that we remain sensitive and considerate when it comes to our employees and their feelings about the Covid-19 situation and we will continue to do so over the next 6 months.
One thing we have learnt from the pandemic is that all our employees can and have been able to work remotely and have been doing so very effectively, which in itself has been a great achievement.
Over the past two months we have had to do things more creatively, for example increasing our presence on social media in order to keep driving the business forward. We’ve continued to embrace technology, with Zoom video calls and Slack playing a huge part in helping us to continue working together and stay connected as a team and I believe this is something that will remain for the foreseeable future.
The message from our CEO, Matt Smith, has always been consistent: “We need to work together to stay as strong as we can for as long as we can” and this is what we all try and do every day.
From a resourcing perspective, we are continuing to grow our team steadily, ensuring we follow our standard recruitment processes and procedures, but now we just replace our physical interviews with video interviews. We’ve also spread the net a lot wider when it comes to hiring talent – we have a number of employees and consultants based in other locations such as Portugal and the USA, as we recognise now, more than ever, that there clearly is a huge pool of talented professionals out there who can successfully work remotely from pretty much any location. Whilst we were open to flexible working prior to the lockdown, the pandemic has definitely helped us to be more open-minded in our approach to our hiring and ways of working.
As challenging as the current environment is at the moment, at SteelEye we have been determined from the start to protect and continue to listen to our people and clients and to keep growing our business. Of course, along the way, many colleagues have experienced some difficult and challenging times, but we strongly believe that if you keep supporting one another and keep working hard together, that we can get through the next six months safely and successfully, and look back and feel like we’ve accomplished a lot as a company. "
Alicia Ariffin, Head of People and Culture at SteelEye.
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