When the pan­dem­ic began to affect the world at large, back in late Feb­ru­ary, my first reac­tion was: well, here comes an unwant­ed vaca­tion for the Doc­tor. Even at that point, I sus­pect­ed there would be a down­turn in the econ­o­my – although I nev­er imag­ined the depth of what hap­pens when you put your entire nation in a deep freeze. Sure enough, job list­ings start­ed drift­ing down, lay­offs began, and I received more than a few ner­vous calls from clients.

The life of a con­sul­tant is boom and bust – and I was pret­ty cer­tain I was head­ing into a bust peri­od.

I was wrong.

I began receiv­ing a steady stream of requests for my ser­vices. Then more. And (luck­i­ly) still more. In oth­er words, no unwant­ed vaca­tion.

So what is up? Why is the Doc­tor busy? And what might it mean for you?

My post-COVID work seems to be falling into a few dif­fer­ent ‘buck­ets’. First, there are the star­tups. Yes, indeed, peo­ple are still launch­ing job boards despite the pan­dem­ic. Now why would any­one do that? Well…perhaps they are look­ing past the near-term fall­out, and instead focus­ing on the effects of an even­tu­al re-open­ing. Any re-open­ing will be accom­pa­nied by hir­ing. Or per­haps they are focus­ing on the seg­ments of the econ­o­my that are still hir­ing – ware­hous­es, health­care, logis­tics, etc. Launch­ing a start­up in the cur­rent envi­ron­ment is hard – but you know what? Launch­ing a start­up is always hard.

Sec­ond, there are the peo­ple who are using this ‘enforced down­time’ to work on their busi­ness­es – tak­ing care of things that had been put off, reassess­ing oper­a­tional or strate­gic issues, or sim­ply look­ing for oppor­tu­ni­ties that they may have pre­vi­ous­ly over­looked. The Doc­tor is often called in when a busi­ness is doing this, to pro­vide an inde­pen­dent out­side view­point – so I guess I should­n’t have been sur­prised when those peo­ple start­ed call­ing.

Final­ly, there are those folks who are look­ing to buy (or sell). Dis­rup­tions – such as pan­demics or reces­sions – also cre­ate oppor­tu­ni­ties. A job board that was nev­er for sale before could sud­den­ly become ‘avail­able’. A site that was over­lever­aged could be an unsus­tain­able lia­bil­i­ty to the cur­rent own­er. And so on. The Doc­tor often gets called to pro­vide val­u­a­tions for job boards – so no sur­prise there, either.

In oth­er words, there are plen­ty of rea­sons for peo­ple in the job board indus­try to be busy right now, even if the actu­al hir­ing pic­ture is pret­ty ugly in a lot of places. And I guess that I should have fore­cast that I would not get that (unwant­ed) vaca­tion! I’m not com­plain­ing! So, yes – the Doc­tor is in.

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