Employers and employees are planning to make big career moves in 2021, despite ongoing unknowns from the COVID-19 crisis.
Almost half of employees plan to look for a new job this year, according to research from job searching site Monster. Employees can feel optimistic about their options: over 80% of employers plan to make new hires and hire back previously laid off and furloughed employees.
While employees and employers have a positive outlook about the year ahead, HR will continue to face challenges when it comes to finding the right candidates. Monster found that 87% of employers are struggling to hire qualified employees due to a widening skills gap, as potential candidates have remained out of the job market for almost a year.
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“With 2020 behind us, we can begin the new year with a brighter outlook and plans for the coming months,” Scott Gutz, CEO of Monster, said in a statement. “We're fully aware of the challenges the talent acquisition industry faces, including the broadening skills gap, the pandemic's impact on our mental health and the need for more diverse workplaces.”
As HR managers are looking for new hires, more than a third of employees said building a diverse and inclusive workplace is top of mind. However, 56% of employers have no plans to update their D&I strategies, the Monster survey found.
One way employers can hire more inclusively is to recognize how implicit biases are impacting recruiting, says Howard Ross, an unconscious bias trainer at Udarta Consulting, a corporate D&I firm. Remote work has made this harder: 41% say effectively assessing candidates during the interview process has been difficult, according to Monster.
“The brain makes decisions based on previous experiences and those memories guide us in how we deal with current experiences,” Ross says. “Now that we’re in Zoom overload, we have less personal interaction and we're going to fall back on stereotypes.”
Read more: Salesforce, Google rank high with new Glassdoor diversity ratings
Forty-five percent of employers say they are reworking their recruiting processes to attract more diverse talent, Monster found. Companies including Merck, GM and Walmart have pledged to hire one million Black employees over the next decade through the OneTen initiative, which focuses on hiring and training Black workers without four-year college degrees.
Being open with company values and committing to continuous changes is a critical step as employers broach complicated recruitment decisions during COVID and beyond.
“Most people see diversity as this thing to spend some time on, get it fixed and move on,” Ross says. “That's a problem because we're dealing with a systemic issue that is deeply embedded in everything we do. We need to be able to look inward and say, ‘How can I shift my perspective to understand other people, and how can they shift their perspective to understand me?’ That way, we can really get a deeper understanding of each other.”
