When you’re in the mid­dle of a dis­as­ter, your hori­zon shrinks. Instead of think­ing about the com­ing year, you’re focused on mak­ing it to the end of the week. Chal­lenges are being dumped on your (vir­tu­al) desk on a dai­ly basis – so you’re not step­ping back to con­sid­er the big­ger pic­ture. In fact, it’s not entire­ly clear exact­ly what the big­ger pic­ture is.

The big­ger pic­ture is a big rea­son why I con­duct the Recruit­ing Trends sur­vey each year. It’s a chance to get your input on what has hap­pened to you in the past year – and what you think will hap­pen in the com­ing year. I’ll have the com­plete results avail­able in a few weeks, but an ear­ly analy­sis pro­vides a sense of how the hir­ing indus­try is stay­ing the same – and also chang­ing.

It will not sur­prise you to learn that rev­enues over the past 12 months are down for 59% of the respon­dents. What I found more inter­est­ing was that 22% saw increas­es in rev­enue dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. Even more promis­ing is that 62% have seen increas­es in rev­enue in the past 30 days. That does­n’t mean that things are ‘back to nor­mal’ – but it seems to indi­cate that enough busi­ness­es across a vari­ety of indus­tries have start­ed hir­ing again to have an impact on recruit­ing sites.

We know that remote work has become the de-fac­to norm in many indus­tries – but that it can’t trans­late into many areas, such as health care, hos­pi­tal­i­ty, and the skilled trades. Peo­ple still need to be phys­i­cal­ly present to do this work. How­ev­er, is the ‘how’ of hir­ing in those ‘non-remote’ indus­tries chang­ing? One pos­si­bil­i­ty – at least based on the sur­vey results – is an increased use of assess­ments and screening. Those respon­dents whose sites cater to ‘non-remote’ indus­tries are twice as like­ly to offer assess­ment and screen­ing ser­vices to their employ­ers, com­pared to sites that are cater­ing to ‘white col­lar’ employ­ers. This would make log­i­cal sense – if you have less direct con­tact with can­di­dates dur­ing the hir­ing process, assess­ments help off­set that lack of expo­sure and pro­vide insight into the can­di­date’s capa­bil­i­ties.

Anoth­er change seems to be the rise in ser­vices that allow employ­ers to man­age the hir­ing and onboard­ing of new employ­ees remote­ly. In this case, it seems the pan­dem­ic is sim­ply accel­er­at­ing what were already exist­ing trends. An obvi­ous add-on that recruit­ing sites could offer employ­ers would be video-based inter­view­ing sys­tems – either pre-record­ed or live. These have been around quite a while – but now seems to be their time to thrive.

What isn’t clear is what the pan­dem­ic will ulti­mate­ly do to cer­tain sec­tors, such as restau­rants. Will they ever return to what they were – or are they sim­ply going to morph into some­thing dif­fer­ent, that is less reliant on in-per­son and more reliant on deliv­ery? I have no insight into this – but it will cer­tain­ly take months or years to play out.

What I do know is that crises – and you have to call the pan­dem­ic the moth­er of all crises! – pro­vide oppor­tu­ni­ty as well as chaos. Now is a good time to con­sid­er if the pan­dem­ic has changed the hir­ing fun­da­men­tals in your busi­ness.

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