The Impact of a Global Pandemic on People's Job Mindsets

And since I was part of the panel this morning, I, I realized that the topic of talent management and recruiting seems to be a, a big topic in your, in your industry. Yeah. Thank you very much for the good introduction. So actually, I, I think I can skip some slides and I'm very sorry. I have to warm up a little bit. My English. Yeah. This is the title, the impact of the global pandemic on people's job mindsets. My name is Ruben Rola I'm CEO of tr like you mentioned before, we are focusing market research on labor market. Not only in Germany, but also worldwide, but Germany is our focus market.

Our most of our customers are from Germany. Of course, if you want to connect with me, please feel free to do so on any of those social networks. The company is 21 years old.

We, we stand for data driven HR. During this time we, we had surveyed about 4.5 million people. Nowadays.

We about, we have about 250,000 participants in our surveys every year. And from some of these participants, I will present the data for 18 months.

Now, nearly 20 month where we are doing something we call monitor. We don't do yearly surveys. We switched in the very beginning of the pandemic. We switched into a monthly, into a monthly modes, into a monthly survey so that we can have a look in what is happening exactly from month to month. And it actually changed due to political decision due to the waves of the pandemic.

And also, so during the last 18 month we questioned, or we, we had nearly 70,000 respondents in this area. We have more than 240 perspectives. I didn't know the exactly word, but it's, it's 240 topics from those topics. I will present some of you because I think they have an impact on people's mindset and all those people, our population can be divided in four main target groups, 16 sets and 64 subsets. And we will look on the data of one of the 16 sets. So we are looking on the data of it. Professionals.

We also have data to pupils students, but today's focus will be it professionals in Germany. If you look on the POME, one of the first things we wanted to know is will the willingness to change your job, change what you see on the slide? Sorry for the one question are going to be the slight center to the participants afterwards. Okay. On the slides, you can actually read it clearly. So I will explain a little bit more on the left side, you see all professionals with academic background on the right side, you see the it professionals.

I always try to use some kind of Comparion groups so you can better see what's happening with the it professionals. What you see here on the slide is the willingness to change the job during the pandemic on the left side, the first point, oh, sorry. On the left side on both sides. The first data point is the point before the pandemic. So that's how people thought they would like to change their jobs before the pandemic started. And then we had some kind of roller coasting of the lines during the pandemic.

You see the lines, the very first line, the dark blue is the, is a very interesting line. It's the line I always look at. If I search for specialists, it's the, the line we call it LA Z. It's an English. It's the word. They actually not look for a job, but if a recruiter comes up within or a job opening, they tend to take it. So they are not actively searching for a job, but they're not, not that happy at their current workings place at their current job that they would not change. So that's a very interesting line.

And the, the light blue line is the line. We call window shopper. Those people tend to look on Mondays. They come after long weekends to work and say, okay, on Mondays, we look into the job boards, but actually they're just looking. If there's something I might apply for it, but they're not sure. Then we have the purple or the pink line. The pink line are those who are actively searching for jobs every day who send applications and the golden or yellow line. This is the line from the people who say they don't search at all.

And this is a very interesting metric for me, especially for our customers, for the recruiters, because it depends on the strategy of the customer. It tells you how much potential there is on the market. And it changed dramatically during the pun me. So you can see like in the it professional area in October, 2020, your potential of direct approach, the dark blue line completely went down and you were able to switch your strategy from direct search into job advertisement.

What is, for example, the, the purple line, the, the pink line. So in this metrics, you can see how you can act as an employer, whether you go more in the direction of job advertisement, or perhaps more in the direction of, of direct approach, I show showed you, or I'm showing you these metrics and these graphs in the very beginning, because you can see also other things we will come on later on, on slides afterwards, we will come back on this. If you look on the pandemic on a global level, also all people on the world have the same input. Like we have a global pandemic.

The output is very differently. For example, you see saw the metrics of Germany on the right side. It doesn't look like everyone is running and trying to change the job, which actually currently is happening in the us. They call it the great resignation and people are due to a purpose curse course.

They, they, they start changing jobs. It's not the same in Germany and Germany, you have a more security or more job security driven society. So people tend to have a harder grip on their jobs. They tend to not switch jobs so easily, like currently in the us is happening. So you have different, a different, how do you say different outcomes on different places on the world? And in Germany, it is very job security driven.

Of course, we have also subsets in Germany, which are purpose driven, but mainly most of the people, especially through the pandemic, changed their mindset into more secure, more secure mindset in terms of job security. Another point which came up during the pandemic, and this is something where I will show you shortly on the right side, you see on October, 2020, the dark blue line went down.

Actually, everyone recruiters thought those people who are not willing to change their jobs anymore since the blue line is the line where you actually, you are not searching for a job, but you would take an offer. If you get one, this went down and everyone said, okay, the yellow line will go up, but the yellow line didn't go up. The purple line, the pink line went up. And that means the people, they got unsatisfied and some kind of angry with their employers. And you see here, why in Germany, we could clearly find in our data that some companies made some bad decisions during the first wave.

This is something I think it hit the mindset of a lot of employees. Very hard, especially in the academic field, during the first wave in Germany, at least every company was forced to bring their employees, which are able to work from home to work from home. So the offices were were cleared and everyone was working from home. A lot of people experienced this as a more flexible way of working after the first wave. It was like September, August, September 20, 20, a lot of companies, nearly 60% said, oh, it looks like the pandemic is coming to an end.

Everyone, please come back to the office. There's no home office anymore. There's no flexibility anymore. I think the old word was good. That was what a lot of companies told or did decided in Germany. You see on the right side, I'm very sorry that the writing of the, of the graphic is still in German, but I, I will tell you the important number is in the third line, the 46.9% on the left side, this shows how many people said that they would deny a job offer. They would've refused a job offer. If the employer has no or only very few opportunities to work flexible or from home.

And if you see on the left side, you can see about 60% change their mind as an employer after September and said, please come back to the office just to realize one month later, they have all to send them back into the home office situation.

And if you combine this with the right information, you will come clearly back to this situation where you can see, okay, especially it guys and girls are very sensitive to this topic because if you see an average, if you ask how many days in the week do you want to work from home people in the it area, they want to work like 3.5 days in average, from home, all other branches or other job profiles only want to four, two to 2.5. So this topic of working from home or remote or more flexible is clearly an it topic.

And here you can perhaps understand why they start applying when all those employers started to bringing them back into the office. Sorry. So actually this is something I, I, when I saw that was like, oh my God, that, that can't be true because already in August, some of the experts were telling us, there will be a second wave. And also there will be a, perhaps a third wave. So the employers could be clearly aware of the fact that they have to send them all back again.

So there, there was some kind of small, not a revolution, but you and the data, you can clearly see that most of the employees in the academic field does not apply to non-academic only in the academic field. They were unhappy with those decisions. Remote work was a very interesting fact, which came on our vision or on our plan. Like in October, when we realized that employers clearly do take the wrong decisions, also, they know. So we started only a survey on remote work in the very beginning of this week to do a little bit more research on this topic.

And we really realized that with the flexibility of work and the digitization we had in the last 20 month, another topic came up, which at least for Germany is a very hard topic. 58% of the academics we, we questioned, or we asked, would work remotely for a company, which headquarter is not located in Germany. This is actually something new. Before I started with working for trends. I also was a recruiter and we always tried to hire people from, from abroad, from other countries, especially in it functions, but all my companies, they wanted them to move to Germany.

It was clearly, it was didn't, it wasn't questioned. If you hire something, someone abroad, he has to move to Germany, he will get relocation service, he will get everything.

And he, or she can, can clearly move to Germany. Now we are asking the Germans or the, the it professionals in this case, okay. We have a more flexible working environment companies.

They, now they know how to, how to do more flexible working, how to build a more flexible working environment. And most of the people say, yeah, of course I can clearly imagine working from Germany for company, which is not which headquarters, not in Germany. So what happened suddenly is that our competitive field enlarged most of our customers.

So if I, if I ask them, who are your competitors? Most of them in the first place, they tell me their product competitors, which must not be the same as the recruiting competitors, but it is a good approach because if it's a product competitor, the company might search for the same talents as I do. If I know ask you, okay, what are your global competitors in terms of recruitment? Most of my customers, they wouldn't know the answer because they haven't thought about that. The people will be hat hunted from other places of the world, and they don't have to move for Germany.

It's especially very interesting because I think I've not the number at two, didn't bring the number, but I think about 60% persons this year, 60% of those we are, we asked they have no problem with an English speaking culture. I think this was years, some years before it was clearly different. Now we have a more internationalized target group here at the moment, Another point, which changed during the PME. And actually I think it was there before, but it was not that clear before is the topic of knowledge.

A lot of people we asked and we had in our surveys and also in interviews, they realized during the pandemic, the thing is not my employer. The thing, the thing I can get security from is my knowledge. If my knowledge is bad, I won't get hired again. If my knowledge is good or better, or on the level of the market, I, I have a good opportunity to get another job. This is also true for it professionals. And the interesting thing is they realize that really very good in this part of the surveys. This was a survey from December, 2020. We asked for the new res resolutions.

We had like nearly one year of pandemic. Everyone was like 20, 21 will be the year. The pandemic will be, will end in this year. So we thought about asking the people, what are, what are your new year's resolutions? And the interesting thing is as well as the academics and the non-academic, they rated job Fixel means changing job, switching jobs, very high. So academics told us last year, end of last year, one of the main resolutions, the one thing I want to complete next year, I want to change my job.

And the second important thing is presumably Hiva and VI means personal development in terms of working or knowledge for my work. This is the second important thing for me in 2021. So they realized the only thing which I have is my knowledge. And the second thing a lot of people realize is the current employer I'm working for. Didn't behave very well. I am some kind of not happy, unhappy with my current situation.

Now, perhaps it is luck or it's not luck in, in the us. The, the result was the great resolution. A lot of people quit their jobs without having any new job. This is something which normally doesn't happen in Germany. People are very planned and try to have the next job before they're quitting their jobs. But I think we will have some kind of Loosening of this situation.

I, I'm not sure if I can put this correctly in English, but the more job opportunities you have on the market. And currently we are living on a German market where we have 30% more jobs than before the pandemic. These amount, big amount of job opportunities gives another kind of security. So people might tend to quit their jobs without having the next opportunity.

And to be honest in your area and your field, where you look for it, specialists of the, in the field of cybersecurity, they anyway, they don't have any, any reasons to believe not to get the next job if they quit their jobs in Germany, the mindset. And that's very interesting, got another twist. And you can see these in the data of the pupils and also a little bit, not that much in the data of the it professionals. And I would like you to have a look at the light blue line in this case, this is the line for the public sector. You see pandemics, the pandemic starts.

Everyone gets a little bit afraid about how, how is my job? How will my job proceed? How is my company surviving this situation? And suddenly the public sector gets more and more attractive, never before were so many applicants or people employees attracted by the public sector in this year, like before. So this is something which also happened in at, at least in Germany.

We don't have these data from other countries, but at least in Germany, you see through the seeking for job security, the public sector suddenly gets more and more attractive, but we also had some other impact during this PME, perhaps question to in the auditorium. Does anyone use clubhouse showing just hands? Okay.

Oh, one that's a lot. Just to give you an impression during the PME, people had more time to deal with social media. They were forced to deal more with social media. So they had to look at those which come new like clubhouse, but actually it was just the type it came down again. But the interesting thing is, and I just get the sign that I have to end quickly. The thing is one of the key points is that the it professionals developed during the Perme the some kind of first mover mindset. You can look at that afterwards. I will show you here.

We have some newcomers like paparazzi, perhaps no one knows that, but it's a new social network or Spotify green room, or what you see here, poly work, all new social networks, which were born through during the POME. And what you can see in the, in the data is that the, it professionals are those who are most likely to do to use those new social networks. This was actually something I was very surprised with because they even outnumbered the students. So if there's something new in the last 20 month, the it professionals wanted to test it, perhaps it is due to more time or whatever.

I can't say it, but it's a very interesting fact that we have such great interest in new things in the it department or in the it field. If I do the conclusion for today, the big mindset shifts is employees got much more sensitive to sensitive reactions to the behaviors of employees, employers, especially because the market is so well. So if you behave bad as an employer, you can be sure your, your employees will react. The relevance of remote work exploded. Education is an answer to regressive job security.

So if you have issues with this in your, at your, at your working place, or as an employer, education is a very big topic. And the last thing, and that was the most surprising thing for me is it is the new social, social first movers, like the social media first movers, as long as every time a new social network came up, it was on it first. And that was very impressive. And the slide I skipped was social audio and audio also in this field, the most heavy users for podcasts and all that topic. Are it professionals? Thank you very much.

Sorry for running through the slides, but perhaps there are some questions.