Companies Start Hiring
When looking into two Indonesia’s most popular business news portals Investor Daily and Bisnis Indonesia, the website homepage are filled with positive looking articles on growing sales and business expansion across different industry sectors. In 2020, a lot of businesses were hit by the pandemic, and many have cut down employees, but the wheels have turned and the business climate has improved for the better.
The improvement in the business climate has also brought a positive impact to the recruitment industry. We see more companies are expanding, and recruitment has become a continuous need instead of urgent ones.
“It used to be that companies only hiring for urgent positions or replacements for a while. But now I see businesses are closing up their budget in Q4 are actually expanding their teams or projects, and so companies are focused on bringing in new, great people to support their new business ideas,” explained Andrew Haris, CEO of Select Headhunter.
However, the Covid-19 pandemic has shifted people’s priorities in jobs and reassessed the meaning of what a good job is for employees. Job seekers now can become more demanding than ever. An Indeed survey in 2021 found that in today’s job market, employers’ believe candidates top priorities when considering a move are as follows: higher pay (59%), schedule flexibility (58%), better work-life balance (56%), remote work options (54%) and the ability to focus on personal and family responsibilities (50%).
Companies should take this into consideration and should realise that the job market is no longer saturated, and treat great candidates wisely. Today, great candidates are overwhelmed with options which means companies should take their decision not only wisely, but quickly.
Theresa Adams from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) stated that regardless of the situation, the recruitment process that takes a long time can backfire on employers since candidates may perceive employers to not be considerate. “At the end of the day, candidates may choose to not work with them.”
In the recruitment industry so far, Select Headhunter sees the change of companies behaviour in their headcounts. “It used to be that in the beginning of the pandemic, companies were reducing their headcounts, and continuing to maintain that number but now we are looking at companies expanding and growing their headcounts. This means hiring needs are increasing,” Andrew Hairs added.
Given the fact that great candidates are overwhelmed by offers since companies are recruiting similar roles at the same time, companies need to realise that recruitment speed has become very important. The slower it takes, the more salary they may have to offer to compensate for the time or opportunity loss in between each process.
