Struggling with recruitment and staff turnover? You’re not alone. With global birthrates declining and more baby boomers leaving the workforce, we’re looking at the worst labor shortage in history.
On the other hand, the arrival of a bear market in May has lots of tech firms either laying off employees or freezing headcount in bracing for the coming economic turbulence. Perhaps this could be a silver lining to the cloud – the situation will allow lots of new, quality talents to be circulated throughout the market and help to ease the labor shortage problem.
However, companies will have to start facing the reality that in the post-Covid era, a good salary is no longer the only consideration for talent in terms of what they deem a “good job”. With remote work becoming part of the new norm, job flexibility will be among job candidates’ top considerations.
According to data from Global Workplace Analytics, 37% of remote workers are willing to take a pay cut of 10% to be allowed to continue working from home. Many workers even reject onsite jobs altogether, making it clear how dramatically attitudes towards work have shifted.
Remote work holds multiple benefits for both companies and talent.
For businesses and job banks, it means their potential talent pool is no longer limited to the country that they operate from. Conducting remote interviews to recruit high numbers of talent also contributes to high savings in terms of capital and human resources. Having employees work from home can also reduce physical office costs.
For workers, the benefit of remote work is that they can arrange their own schedule and work environment, creating a win-win situation for both sides.
Businesses will need to implement internal changes to adapt as hybrid work becomes the new norm, such as developing or adopting remote collaboration software and systems. This is creating lots of new opportunities for startups, who are creating a wide variety of solutions: communication and chat, document and information management, account management, virtual office, design collaboration, and software development collaboration.
Most of these services are built around boosting productivity and collaboration – besides well-known tools such as Slack or Zoom, designers and coders use collaborative platforms like Figma and Gitlab, respectively.
Cherubic Ventures portfolio company Terminal.io helps businesses in hiring remote engineers throughout the entire process, starting from filtering suitable candidates to post-recruitment tasks like onboarding, cross-border salary issuance, tax reporting, insurance, and compliance with local regulations. These kinds of services wholly remove the need for a physical office when recruiting talent.
In the midst of all these changes, there are still many painpoints to be resolved and corresponding opportunities for startups.
Of course, attracting talent doesn’t end at flexibility. According to LinkedIn’s Future of Work Trends for 2022, providing talent with a plan for rotating through different job roles gives them more space to show their ability, which aids in retention. Managers also need to show employees that they are valued and cared about.
This moment of big change is the perfect timing for businesses to pivot. Embracing rather than resisting change and evolving internal policies in step will not only help recruit and retain talent, but will be key to staying competitive.
