Who lives well in the labor market? Or recruiter’s notes in 2020

The work of the master is afraid, but the master does not care about the crisis. So I would continue the well-known Russian proverb, speaking about the current situation on the labor market. We have now entered an interesting and difficult period, when the business world is shaking quite hard, and someone falls out of the loop, and someone finds opportunities to show their strong skills even more.

My name is Anya, I have been looking for talent for over six years, the last three of them in the IT field. I am now part of the great Talent Acquisition team at Exness. In this article, I want to share my thoughts and some recommendations from the perspective of a person who daily enters into negotiations with candidates for completely different roles and knows what is happening now with the requirements for applicants, and how they feel about themselves. My goal is to warn and arm. Not so pretentious and dramatic, but still =) Let’s talk about everything in order.

5-6 years before … (a short excursion into the situation of past years)

When I started my recruiting career at the end of 2013, the labor market was on the verge of a crisis. And already in the summer of 2014, I remember how, while working in a recruiting agency in Moscow, I felt this, when our team suddenly reduced the number of hiring orders, and only some of the most difficult ones remained from the largest market players. The dynamics of vacancies during the crisis years can be seen below:

Fortunately, this did not last long, and then the situation was more or less stable.

Who were the companies looking for the most then? According to the statistics of work sites and research of recruiting agencies, sales managers were most in demand, the popularity of roles in IT was gaining momentum, and this trend was growing. Also then, and over the past few years, there was a fairly large demand for junior specialists who had recently graduated from institutes and had minimal experience, but strong motivation. Large companies, for example, Yandex, actively developed internship programs that helped them to form a talent pool, and young guys to gain experience in cool, complex projects. Many medium and small companies were ready to hire novice programmers, for example, and spend some time on training. However, let’s see what’s happening now.

Who is guilty? (current situation)

So, if we continue the topic about young professionals, we can note that the number of vacancies for them has dropped, even if we compare the beginning of 2019 and 2020. For example, a large hunting platform hh.ru cites the following graph in its research:

Here we see that the number of vacancies has dropped by 34% compared to last year and is now well below the number of candidates. This creates a problem of job search for people aged 22-25, which was not the case in previous years.

You all know that at the beginning of this year there was an event that globally affected many areas of life, including the labor market. I’m talking, of course, about the coronavirus.

During the pandemic, the demand for junior specialists in all areas fell, of course, it is no coincidence. Since the beginning of this year, many companies have been forced to cut their costs, transfer employees to remote locations. In Russia, in crisis conditions, the state has forbidden to fire workers, for which it promised some compensation. Until September-October, companies were waiting for this compensation, and there were no major reductions. However, already now those who did not receive money from the state or received it insufficiently began to part with their employees.

Since the skill of remote work is now becoming important, people who are not able to effectively perform tasks at home, as well as those who find it difficult to configure programs on their own, say, on a laptop (there are hardly any of them among those who read the article), immediately fall under the abbreviations. They also part ways with those whose contracts are running out, and with novice specialists, in whose training you need to invest time and money.

Recruiting in many companies is paused. In those who continue to actively search for employees, roles of the Senior level are opening more and more, less often – Middle. It becomes extremely important the level of professionalism and the ability to quickly join new tasks, as well as switch at high speed with any changes, we will talk about this below.

What to do?

As Alena Vladimirskaya (a well-known headhunter of Russia) notes in one of her interviews, if you feel that you belong to a risk group and your position in the company is vulnerable, it’s time to draw up a job search plan, if you are not sure, the actions are the same. Link to interviewanyone interested.

But what areas of business are worth considering now? Who will grow in the current environment?

• Of course, first of all, it is medicine and pharmaceuticals, especially in the trend of biotechnology;

• Also agro-industry, since in a situation of isolation, many countries have realized the importance of this sector;

• Robotics, because where possible, people will try to be replaced by robots. This process has been going on for a long time and is very likely to accelerate now;

• Fintech is a field where almost everything can be brought online;

• In general, all online entertainment, including the gaming industry;

• Online educational platforms;

• Cybersecurity – Of course, the more we are online, the more we need to protect our data.

Recent events in the world have shown how fragile and unstable everything is. Companies must be able to restructure. At Exness, for example, we were able to first transfer our employees to a remote location, and after the lockdown, we re-equipped the office so that it was convenient to work in a hybrid home-office scheme. You can read about this in the article.

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When looking for employees, now an important criterion is to assess not just the presence of stress resistance in a person, but the ability to reorient, not get lost in ever-changing conditions, the ability to offer non-standard solutions to problems. Who else is valued at the moment? These are people who know how to negotiate with companies in times of crisis, who know how to sell well, because at this time everything is sold harder, these are business development managers, sales specialists and not only.

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There is also a growing demand for anti-crisis specialists and bankruptcy lawyers.

In any company, narrow-profile specialists and masters of their craft are also valuable now.

From observing the mood of candidates

My colleagues and I from the team communicate every day with people of various professions, mainly in the IT field.

It can be noted that many are now not ready to change jobs. If everything is more or less stable at the current place, people are not very willing to make contact and consider new opportunities. Also, before the pandemic, we actively relocated people from different countries, most often from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, but now this is more difficult to do. And there is a tendency towards a more cautious attitude towards relocation: many are not ready to relocate due to the unstable situation in the world and the closure of borders. Revival, perhaps, we observe among candidates from Belarus and, for example, Lebanon, but this is due to political and economic problems in these countries. Overall, job seekers have become more passive.

The last part, the final

Summing up, I want to return to the thought of the masters. Because their time has come, the time of professionals in their field, experienced, deeply and widely versed in their field. Now companies are looking for, for example, not just programmers, but engineers in the broad sense of the word, not just product managers, but with skills to improve processes in the company, and so on.

Therefore, the best plan is to analyze your skills and start pumping the most important ones, as well as develop your best strengths even more, become a specialist with unique knowledge.

If you want to change the field of activity, now, of course, is not the best time for this, for the same reasons that we talked about above, now is not the time for beginners. However, as you develop yourself in your current role, you can already start taking steps towards changing careers, taking courses, learning, trying and taking action when the market becomes more stable.

As we can see, everything is not so scary, and there is still a “ray of light in the dark kingdom” and ways not to fall out of the cage.

Hope the article was helpful. I wish everyone good luck and good health!

Article by Anna Mikhailovskaya, Talent Specialist at Exness.