Looking Beyond Coronovirus

Better ways of working include new opportunities in recruiting. The best time to hire the best people at the best price is now.


There is hardly anything good about a pandemic. But one of the upsides from a business perspective is that it puts businesses everywhere in the position to scoop up great talent for less than you might pay in non-covid times.

McKinsey and Company has recently written about the time beyond covid. McKinsey writes that we shouldn’t assume that the old way of doing things is coming back, and to prepare for a future where new ways of working and thinking will take priority; remote working, networks and team working, combined with agility, will be the order of the day. Stop assuming that the old ways will come back and start thinking about how a distributed workforce needs to operate. They say, “Remote working is about more than giving people a laptop. Some of the rhythms of office life can’t be recreated. But the norms associated with traditional work—for example, that once you left the office, the workday was basically done—are important. As one CEO told us, ‘It’s not so much working from home; rather, it’s really sleeping at the office [now].’”

McKinsey goes on to say, “There is some evidence that data-based, at-a-distance personnel assessments bear a closer relation to employees’ contributions than do traditional ones, which tend to favor visibility. Transitioning toward such systems could contribute to building a more diverse, more capable, and happier workforce. Remote working, for example, means no commuting, which can make work more accessible for people with disabilities; the flexibility associated with the practice can be particularly helpful for single parents and caregivers. Moreover, remote working means companies can draw on a much wider talent pool.”

Not only that, but companies can draw on new people who, until recently, haven’t been in market at all. The era of layoffs and furloughs isn’t bad for companies, and maybe not so bad for most people. Yes, there are massive layoffs and disruption, but it gives all companies a better opportunity to find the talent that wasn’t in the market pool of candidates until now, and it might open employees up to new ways of seeing work, from moving, to remote work, to contract work. It’s less than ideal to lay people off and shed a workforce, but the opportunity is now for you to grab the talent you need and lack, and move ahead with your new game plan. Working in makeshift ways during this pandemic won’t last forever, and businesses will shift to new models and new ways of doing things. If you plan to be competitive in the new era, you need to be one of them.

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