Be Prepared: Have a strong hiring strategy coming out of COVID

Be prepared.  A scouts motto but it certainly can be applied to today’s job market.  If you haven’t noticed, there has been an increase in opportunities out there in the engineering & manufacturing sectors but it’s not going to slow down anytime soon.  So if you need or are thinking about bringing in top talent, the time is now!   Back in March 2020, the job market was nuts.  It was simple.  There was a 12-18 month lead up to that point where it was becoming harder and harder to find good people.  Hard to find top talent.  COVID has just hidden this demand.  First off, since around September 2020, companies had their COVID policies in place and were becoming more familiar with the new normal and hiring started back up.  As you can imagine, there was not a lot of hiring from March to June-July of 2020.  The increase in roles from last September to now has been a steady increase with a slight drop during the lockdown at the start of 2021.  Here are a couple of the other signs of why you need to jump on hiring now:   Retirements.  Who was going to retire during the pandemic?  A lot of upcoming retirements were pushed off if they had the choice.  With all the uncertainty, why not take a paycheck to, in some cases, work from home.  In other cases, it was still better to push off retiring to get the stability of a paycheck and retiring once the pandemic was over.  So, over the next 6-12 months, I bet you we will see an uptick...

How is the pandemic is affecting the job market?

How are you seeing the pandemic affect the job market?  Although a lot of manufacturing companies in Canada are still up and running for the time being.  Have companies put hiring on hold?  Are the processes dragged out?  Or is it business as usual and you’ve found a new job?   We have seen a combination of all of the above.  Having said that, in the markets that we have been doing work in recently (general manufacturing, industrial manufacturing, building materials, construction services, aerospace, automotive), hiring has almost come to a standstill.  It makes sense.  Feedback has been that they would rather be able to put that cost to keeping their current employees but that means bringing new people on board has to be put on hold.  If it is a key position?  Companies seem to be moving forward but still at a cautious pace.  And I’d say that started before things got to where they are now.  You could see it in January and February.  Construction & Building Materials do seem to be moving forward.  Infrastructure is a focus and these projects are going to keep needing people and need to be completed.  I still think thats a small percentage though. If you are in the pharmaceutical, medical devices, logistics and/or CPG industries to name a few, I can see it as being busy.  We have not seen this directly ourselves but it does make sense. What can you do if you are effected as a job seeker? Ensure your resume is up to date and can make an impact by using services like manufacturingresumes.ca.  You want to...