The coronavirus has undoubtedly had a catastrophic ripple effect that has affected people in so many different ways.
Hundreds of thousands of people have sadly lost their lives around the world. Economies have been hit with businesses and livelihoods also being lost.
Realm Recruit, an agency which specializes in recruitment for the legal sector conducted a report entitled: How has Covid-19 affected you and your work/business? To gain an insight into the effects being felt in the sector.
The report’s aim was to:
“Examine how the pandemic will affect the legal profession in terms of employee engagement, attraction and retention.”
It’s clear that Covid-19 would have an impact on the jobs market and wouldn’t discriminate against any sector.
However, since the recession in 2008 there has been a skills shortage in the legal sector, which has left some employees with the knowledge they are not easily replaceable.
Fast-forward ten years, and the coronavirus pandemic has begun to shake up a seemingly calm legal recruitment marketplace.
Of those employees surveyed by Realm Recruit 38% said they’d actively start looking for alternative employment once the pandemic has subsided, this is an increase of the 24% who said they were actively seeking alternate options prior to Covid-19.
Firms who took part in the survey, were frank and honest about the impact Covid-19 has had on their business. With 27% stating that it was likely they would have to make redundancies as a result of the current climate.
For those that aren’t considering redundancies, 13% have said they’ve stopped all recruitment activity and won’t recruit this year. However, a larger proportion (60%) have said they’ve only paused their recruitment activity, but will regularly review to ensure they have the resources they need to continue growing their business.
Well-being and the way employers treat their employees has also come up highly in this report. 90% of employers feel they do this very or fairly well. However, employees seemed to have a slightly different view, with only 40% stating that their organisation looked after their mental well-being very or fairly well.
The report stated:
“Given the looming recession and the reality that businesses contract and people lose their jobs during an economic downturn, job security is unsurprisingly one of five factors out of a total of nineteen that more lawyers voted as more important than just as. It isn’t surprising either that flexibility and home working options are going to be demanded more of employers, with home working becoming normalised because of the pandemic and more than half of lawyers feeling that their productivity is either just as good or has improved as a direct result.”
