Recruiting in times of Covid-19 – a personal experience

The global economy is experiencing what is probably its deepest slump since WW2. Unemployment is rising dramatically in many countries, above all in the USA and Great Britain. Dismissals are the order of the day, new hires are scarce.
The crisis is not sparing logistics companies either, as the slump in intercontinental transport volumes shows. Nor recruitment agencies, as this personal report by Markus Bock, the owner of the Hamburg-based specialist for HR Consulting & Recruiting, Facts & Skills, illustrates. Yet, besides the suffering being caused by Covid-19, he also sees the virus as an accelerator of innovation.

On 25JAN20, my wife returned to Hamburg after a 3-week stay in Beijing and Shanghai, where we have branches, and at the same time as she came back, I became ill. It was not simply a slight cold, as would be usual at this time of year, but fever, coughing, and extreme fatigue - first contact with the corona virus?
I still do not know. The general practitioner did not want to receive me in his practice, the local university hospital did not feel responsible and the helpful lady from the nationwide corona hotline referred me as a Hamburg resident to the Bernhard Nocht Institute, a world-leading specialist facility for tropical medicine. After two telephone calls with members of the Institute and answering several questions, I knew that I did not belong to the risk group and that I probably only had a simple but severe flu, like a great many others.

Phase of contract cancellations began in early February
At the same time as "my" flu, we received the first contract cancellations in Hamburg. Logistics service providers who were looking for specialists for the sea freight import business or their fairs & events department, lamented the drop in orders and suspended any new hiring for the time being. This was also the case with some airfreight logistics providers.
At the Hamburg headquarters of a large Asian shipping company, applicants called and asked to be allowed to attend job interviews outside the company building because they were concerned about being infected with the coronavirus within the office. This was all in February, before contact restrictions were imposed in Germany and other countries.
Video-based interviews have been used in the recruiting selection process in China already since the beginning of February. However, the final interview still takes place face to face, both in Germany and China, thus for China all final interviews have been "postponed" until April. In Germany, some logistics companies will start face to face interviews again in the last week of April.

Hardly any new hires at logistics companies
During the course of February and March, an increasing number of logistics service providers in Germany, whether they were SMEs, established medium-sized companies or even large freight forwarding groups, began to stop hiring new staff. Already scheduled job interviews were cancelled at short notice and postponed indefinitely.
We have seen a decline in contracts of around 30% in China since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. We are currently no longer processing any search assignments at all in the Retail and Air&Sea Logistics segment, and in the eCommerce and Internet Plus (online-based services) segment the number of search assignments has fallen by around 20%.

Trend: wait and see
Companies are currently even more cautious in their hiring decisions in Germany than in other countries. The predominant trend among many logistics companies is to wait and see how the pandemic has affected their company and then decide whether and in which positions to hire or replace staff.
Several of the logistics service providers based in Germany have now introduced short-time work. We did the same in Hamburg at the beginning of April. In my opinion, short-time work is indeed a very practical and sensible method for companies to be able to deal with such exceptional situations.
In China, in order to cushion the impact of the pandemic on companies and employees, the government has implemented tax deferrals and a waiver of social security contributions over several months, differentiated according to company size.