Juliann Deegan of Hays Specialist Recruitment

Business Director of Digital Technology at Hays, Juliann has worked for over 15 years within the recruitment business and is one of the Leaders in Hays Technology Business throughout the UK and Ireland, as well as leading her successful Belfast team. Juliann reflects on her teams working from home experience throughout the pandemic:

Monday 2 November 2020

Juliann Deegan of Hays Specialist Recruitment

Business Director of Digital Technology at Hays, Juliann has worked for over 15 years within the recruitment business and is one of the Leaders in Hays Technology Business throughout the UK and Ireland, as well as leading her successful Belfast team. Juliann reflects on her teams working from home experience throughout the pandemic:

The COVID-19 crisis has had a profound impact on the vast majority of industries and, of course, the roles which function within them. This is particularly true of the tech space. The pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation of most businesses. As such, IT roles have become even more integral to ensuring organisations are able to adapt in an agile and effective way throughout each stage of the crisis.

Needing no introduction at this point, the COVID-19 outbreak is the single biggest disruption of a generation. Those of us fortunate enough to have a job that can be done from home have been forced to rethink our working lives in recent months, working closely with our teams to put new technology and processes in place to enable us to keep our businesses functioning in new ways. Whilst many people already had the opportunity to work remotely, for most of us, it was just occasionally. However, as we got deeper into this crisis, more and more organisations had to build infrastructure and operating frameworks to enable a much larger proportion of their workforce to work this way on an ongoing basis.

Juliann asks an interesting question on many people’s mind - how much of that change will become permanent?

The way we hire individuals has also changed. Today, the default way of interviewing potential candidates is by video call – only a few months ago the default was face-to-face. Of course, video interviewing has been around for a long time, but I’m not talking about the initial screening tool that many platforms offer. I’m talking about replacing the traditional “first interview” on site, with a client, for a specific job. For the roles we’ve been asked to hire during the crisis so far, all parties are quite comfortable to take this crucial first meeting online, even though it’s a first time for many.

As we work through this crisis, things seem to be changing daily, so, most of us are evolving our approach as we go. As we become more adept, we’ll be building in the elements we identify as missing along the way – because we are all looking out for those learnings. We’re having to find new ways of having fun together over our video conferencing tool of choice and explore new ways to build and evolve our cultures in different ways than we’re used to.

As the world absorbs the aftershocks of Coronavirus, and we come back to a more certain environment (hopefully soon), won’t we all be considering the learns from this period, and how we carry them forward? Will we ever revert entirely to the way things were? How do we make sure we retain the best of the new and the old?

Monday 2 November 2020