“The Great Decoupling”: how the COVID-19 pandemic may change the way we hire.

By Alberto De Capitani

What odd times we live in. As I’m writing this, a strong westerly wind is battering against the whitewashed walls of my West Wales home where I have been on lockdown now for 6 weeks, creating a pleasant background noise which almost lulls me to sleep. A welcome change from the disruptive noises of London’s urban jungle, sure, but as more and more people begin to embrace (or despise) our new “WFH” work pattern, one of remote collaboration, decreased supervision and an ever blurring distinction between working hours and “me time”, some important questions become unavoidable: with a COVID-19 vaccine well over a year away, will this become the new normal? And how will this affect hiring practices going into this decade?

On April 29th, these very topics were discussed on Newsnight on BBC Two. Emily Maitlis invited a panel of experts, including Beata Javorcik, Chief Economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, who shared what I believe to be serious hypotheses about what our post-coronavirus social and professional patterns will look like: in her opinion, the newly-discovered resilience of online collaboration tools, as well as the potential for significant at-desk productivity that the WFH model has demonstrated against all odds, are likely to lead to a “Decoupling” between workers and cities. According to this theory, there will no longer be an absolute need for desk workers to reside in big capital cities to gain access to high-paying jobs, salaries from which get often drained by sky-high rents and living costs. Instead, this traditional model is likely to transition more and more towards decentralisation, where workers can opt to reside in their home regions and maybe come into the office one day a week. Apart from saving businesses and workers time and money, this “Decoupled” method will no doubt, according to Javorcik, revive minor urban centres, often left abandoned as residents rush to major cities in search of the aforementioned jobs. This model is promoted also by Prof, Lawrence Bellamy, Academic Dean for the Faculty of Business, Law and Tourism at the University of Sunderland.

The City of London: will we be seeing fewer commutes post-pandemic? (Photo credit flicksmores on Flickr)

Whilst Javorcik concedes this model presents important pitfalls (reduced physical togetherness will lessen the prospects for new innovative ideas coming to life) and is by no means guaranteed to emerge post-pandemic, it is definitely worth taking a step back to better understand the implications for the ways companies’ hiring practices would have to adapt in response. With a “talent scatter” happening globally, HR departments will have to adapt to job candidates having access to a much wider set of opportunities within a much larger radius of their place of residence.

With a “talent scatter” happening globally, HR departments will have to adapt to job candidates having access to a much wider set of opportunities

In this scenario, speed and execution will be key to outsmarting the competition:

1. Hiring managers will have to master the ways to effectively conduct remote interviews, no matter where the candidate is located. This will involve preparing technical questions in a different way. When dealing with software engineering hires, for example, the much-despised “take-home coding exercise” may make an unlikely comeback.
2. They will also have to up their game on procurement, as further obstacles due to physical distance will emerge when sourcing candidates. In particular, their global outreach will have to improve to attract prospects irrespective of how distant they are from the workplace.
3. In parallel, their ability to diligence those candidates will need to be improved: in this regard, instant verification of their qualifications would be a crucial contributor to achieving this goal. When hiring locally, most firms have tried-and-tested processes to perform qualification checks on local job candidates, but they may face difficulties when doing so for foreign workers. Blockchain technology is a great enabler in this sense: by granting instantaneous access to tamper-proof, 100% genuine digital certificates at the touch of a button, it allows firms to bypass the slow, manual verification channels that are so pervasive today. In their place, a new much leaner process is put in place, one which offers the same instantaneous verification experience irrespective of where the qualification was issued.

An instantly verifiable CV can be a valuable tool for HR departments and screeners to vet candidates irrespective of their location.

These are just three ways HR departments will have to adapt to a more decentralised way of working, one which has already proven its worth in the tech sector and which post-pandemic is likely to “infect” other sectors of the service economy. As we start to emerge from our lockdowns, we may just prefer a more business-as-usual approach of centralised teams and talent hubs, but our message here at Gradbase, echoing Javorcik’s, is that this is not a guarantee. Businesses the world over have to begin to understand the implications of a potential shift to the Great Decoupling. This blog post aims to get the ball rolling on such discussions, by offering some ideas on how businesses can, and will have to, adapt.

Whilst it is business-as-usual for the wild weather patterns of West Wales, a wind of change is likely to sweep away deeply ingrained working patterns. The sound of that won’t be as pleasant.